


Holding On and Letting Go

by simplyprologue



Series: Dustland Fairytales [3]
Category: The Newsroom (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Episode s02e04, Episode s02e05, Episode s02e06, F/M, Gap Filler, Gen, Middle East, Operation Genoa, PTSD, Pre-Series, post season two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-15
Updated: 2014-08-03
Packaged: 2018-01-24 16:00:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 49,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1611002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/simplyprologue/pseuds/simplyprologue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>She’s tried running. Miles and across the sea and back. And she’s tried grinning and bearing it, and breathing through it, and yoga, for a bit. And despite being wholly British in ancestry (despite some tiny drop of Irish somewhere along the line hundreds of years ago, for the name), she isn’t really fond of tea, so she hasn’t tried that.</i> </p><p>Will finds Nina. MacKenzie tries writing, and finds herself along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One Door Swinging Open

**Author's Note:**

> **A/N:** This was originally an attempt to fill in the gaps for Mac's POV from the end of 2.03 through Will breaking up with Nina (so a little into the time jump in 2.06) that very much exploded into being something else. I'm not quite certain this is episode filler anymore... in the sense that this isn't expressly what I want canon to be, although it's definitely an exploration of things that I find potentially interesting. This part is very Mac-centric. I mean, the whole fic will be Mac POV so I suppose that makes the entire fic Mac-centric, but this part especially. This is a companion piece to _The Sadder But Wiser Girl_ with that fic serving as an intralogue of sorts between the two parts of this fic. 
> 
> If you dislike original characters, this is not the fic for you. (Although I do hope the OCs are suitably Sorkinesque.) Warnings for death, violent imagery, suicide ideation (vaguely), and blood. 
> 
> A great many thanks to the group of people who supported me endlessly while writing this, tumblr users: [superspies-and-apple-pie](http://superspies-and-apple-pie.tumblr.com), [pipinthesuburbs](http://pipinthesuburbs.tumblr.com), [fragmentedvisions](http://fragmentedvisions.tumblr.com), [wondertwinc](http://wontertwinc.tumblr.com), [inyourface-nancygrace](http://inyourface-nancygrace.tumblr.com) and especially [mcmacthenewsroom](http://mcmacthenewsroom.tumblr.com).

It happens by accident, mostly.

Winter starts early, when the East Coast is slammed with a Nor’easter and nearly twelve inches of snow for Halloween. It seems to taper off, after, leaving New York City dreary and grey for the last few months of 2011, all stark concrete sidewalks and dark skies, the bright fluorescent lights inside the city’s skyscrapers silhouetting against grey clouds.  

What she writes is _not_ a love story. Nor is it something that’s particularly warm on a winter’s night, but MacKenzie writes it all the same, after the first tabloid story breaks and the senior staff has no idea how to react to the notion that their boss has been dating Nina Howard, the woman that tried to tank them all, for a little over two months.

And… after she sends herself back to weekly appointments with her therapist.

_Have you tried writing?_

She’s tried running. Miles and across the sea and back. And she’s tried grinning and bearing it, and breathing through it, and yoga, for a bit. And despite being wholly British in ancestry (despite some tiny drop of Irish somewhere along the line hundreds of years ago, for the name), she isn’t really fond of tea, so she hasn’t tried that. Besides, it was when all caffeine started to do was make her heart pound in her chest rather than raise her to any level alertness that she decided she had a problem in the first place. 

So no, she hasn’t tried writing.

It’s always been more of Will’s arena, truly.

She tries it anyway, after half a bottle of red. _Don’t ignore what happened with Will_ , her psychiatrist told her. _But don’t make it entirely about him, either. Sift through your own wreckage. It’s like on an airplane. Put on your own mask first. If you take it apart, what does it become?_

So she opens her laptop and stares at an empty word document, which she’s already saved and re-saved a few times different file names, before settling on _therapy.docx_. For subtlety, of course. Mac considers going through her external hard drives—years of footage, every story she filed from the Middle East, typed up notes and carefully-organized pictures and maps—but instead types these words:

_In 2005, I left the DC bureau of CNN, started working for News Night in New York City, and fell in love with Will McAvoy. In 2007, I ruined it. This is what happened after._

 

* * *

 

The next day at work is unbalanced. She watches Will through the lens of where they were five years ago, her mind muddling through her last week as the EP of _News Night_ their first go round, two weeks after the end of their relationship.

_As it turned out, my contract didn’t stipulate that I needed to give two weeks’ notice. So when it became apparent we would be unable to have any sort of relationship, I immediately tendered my resignation. Charlie Skinner, the president of the news division, convinced me to stay a week. The week only wound up convincing me that I needed to go. Far, and away. The show had gone on before me, it would go on after me._

_Head hunters from CNN had been trying to contact me for nearly six months. So one morning, I forced myself to reply to their email. The next day I forced myself to dress nicely, curl my hair, and do my makeup, and go to lunch with them at an Upper East Side bistro. I moved to Atlanta that Saturday, staying in the spare bedroom of someone I’d once worked with at ABC._

_I think people assume that I embedded as a conscious effort to punish myself. That’s not exactly correct. I took the first job that was offered to me, due to my experience in Chechnya, diplomatic connections, and adeptness for languages. No matter where I ended up after News Night, I’m certain I would have found a way to self-flagellate. I’m a very determined and resourceful person. I would have found a way._

_Thankfully, CNN just handed one to me without me having to ask._

Some quiet corner of her mind wonders what it would be like if she gave two weeks notice right now. 

Jim stands by her shoulder during broadcast, and every time she looks at him out of the corner of her eye she sees the ruffled twenty-four year old sweating through dress shirts in the thick Atlanta heat, petitioning her to be embedded.

Her story with Will is a short story; there’s no love, no glory, no grand crescendo. But she looks at Jim, a Senior Producer worth his weight in silver and gold, and feels nothing but pride. Sees a man going places.  

Jim, this show, these people, are the best thing she’s ever done.

 

* * *

 

She writes whenever she can, and rarely about Will.

Setting to disentangle three years of her life, three years of herself, from Will is not simple work, nor kind work.

She carves out the parts of herself that Will inhabits, the parts she has let run wild and untamed if only by the virtue that they belong to him, and examines them, reshapes them to make the edges less sharp, less damaging, and tries to fit them back into herself.

She must make the pain her own, and not let herself tie it to him at all, because if she tethers her self-loathing and guilt to him, she will never let it go. She will never let _Will_ go, and after a month of her staff looking at her like a thing to be pitied and petted, of Charlie’s motivating speeches— _the boy is an idiot_ —and Sloan’s clumsy attempts at consolation— _here, I have a friend, you should get drinks, I think you’d have a lot in common_ —she thinks she needs to learn how to let him go.

She doesn’t want to.

But she knows that tethering herself to Will, in the past five years, has mostly brought her pain, and to the brink of self-destruction several times over.

Maybe the time has come to let go.

Maybe the time has come to consider her penance paid, but the parts of her that she’s cut out are jagged, fractured, and leave her off the even keel. She’s not sure of which parts of herself to hold onto and which parts to let go, her relationship with Will has been imprinted in so much of herself.

So she writes.

Not about Will, but the people she knows she holds onto.

Jim, she writes about.

Meeting him her first day in Atlanta, four weeks after Will kicked her out of his apartment, one week after handing in her letter of resignation at ACN, five days after accepting a position as the point person for CNN’s embed teams in the middle east, the day after moving to the city. How he called her ma’am and she corrected him, and how desperate he’d been to impress her, to get her to take him along with her to the Germany, and the Green Zone after that.

And Molly, the girl with ginger hair from New Jersey. Fragile in her own way, after a rough childhood that formed a patina that coated her features in a brittle hardness that Mac now knows gives way to a dazzling smile, a wicked sense of humor, and a bold heart. Twenty-two, she had been three months into her first job after college, and assigned to be her assistant. Brilliantly efficient and skilled at reading people in a way that she never allowed to be wrong, because for thin redheaded girls from rough homes, it’s a skill you perfect early on.

And Danny, her cameraman from Boston, a young widower in his mid-thirties with no children but a slew of nieces and nephews. Quiet and clever and quick and far too good at any and all card games.

Captain—now Major—Noah Mason from South Georgia, and the first unit they were embedded with. Noah, a recent divorcee with no home to go back, his ex-wife his high school sweetheart who won their hometown in the divorce. Who sat up late at night with her, smiling a sad smile of his own. A ring made out of tinfoil, and their half-desperate attempts to frame their halves into a whole of _something_ , _anything_ that would allow them to keep breathing, each fighting a war they didn't wish to be in.

The boys and men he made his brothers and his sons, rejecting promotion after promotion to stay in combat with them. Various attachments and other embeds, the marines in Islamabad. Doctors from MASH units and from Landstuhl. The Pakistani medic who saved her life.

And then the others: the ones she writes into the past, the ones she knows she has to let go of.

 

* * *

 

_No one laughs at god in a war. No one laughs at god when they’re dying. Zack’s death came on a Tuesday, and his was the first. Not the first death in the unit, but the first death that I saw._

_It started as a routine patrol in a secluded section of the Khyber Pass. Two Humvees, and then a dozen marines on foot as we made our way through the mountains back down to Landi Kotal to where we were, for the moment, based. At the most dangerous part of the trek, with the mountain range to our backs and the waning sunlight obscuring what would be the best vantage points for any sniper, Noah ushered us into the caravan._

_A few minutes later gunfire was exchanged. But by that point, having been embedded for eleven months, we were beginning to be adept at handling the report of gunshots and IEDs and shells. So long as the caravan kept moving, there was nothing to be overly worried about. So we didn’t worry._

_And then the Humvee, on an order from Noah, stopped._

_In early 2008, the Taliban in the Khyber region had, through several different channels, secured rocket launchers. Which was how, as the sun was descending behind the mountains and with the Taliban’s tactical advantage dwindling, we found our Hummer on its side on the road, the metal sheeting on the outside blasted open, the edges crinkled, gnarled, and blackened._

_Zack had thrown himself over Molly, and in the next moment we were being dragged out of the vehicle by Johnno and Frankie._

_I wish I could say that I wasn’t panicked. But four months in Peshawar hadn’t prepared me for the mountains. When the second shell hit the rock formation above our heads, Johnno covered me the best he could as debris and sediment rained down over us. Molly screamed, and the sound of returned fire rang out. I looked up, and there was blood streaming down from her hairline, rivulets of it running into her eyes, a clump of hair and skin missing from two inches above her temple._

_Zack picked her up over his shoulder and we all retreated to where the company was reassembling, and one of the other marines had discovered a cave—low, and wide mouthed, it was our best and only bet at waiting out the insurgents. We wouldn’t be able to light a fire inside, but like most caves in the region, there was hope for access to running water. Zack immediately gestured for Danny and I to crawl under the lip of the entrance, and helped us bring Molly inside, before running for our medic._

_Torso crunched under the short ceiling, trying to keep Molly calm and pouring all the water in my bag into her eyes to wash out the blood, I could barely remember how to breathe._

_In seconds we were bookended by marines—one group moving forward into the cave to secure it, the second at the front, manipulating the ruined Humvee to provide cover as a spray of bullets rained down on us, all the while Molly tried not to scream, confused and concussed and in pain, and Danny continued filming. Jim was with us moments later, helping Tina carry her bags into the cave._

If only Molly’s head wound had been the worst of it. Twenty minutes later—Mac checks Danny’s footage, forcing herself to watch Molly’s head flounder in her lap in the dimly-lit cave as Tina worked to sterilize the wound and remove the flesh singed off her scalp—there’s a tremendous metallic screech, and in the aftermath their hideout is flooded with men. Mac watches herself, in the video, look up when Noah and Johnno drag Zack over to Tina.

_“Him first,” Noah said, calm and frantic all in one breath. “We got the base on the radio.”_

_Tina had looked at Zack for all of five minutes before shaking her head at Johnno, who went to find Noah. I slid my arms out of my jacket and gently balled it under Molly’s head, leaving her with Jim and Danny before moving over to Zack._

_I spoke about triage a few pages ago—you treat the ones you can save._

_And Zack knew—I had just watched him wave Tina off and back over to Molly. But he let me gather him into my lap all the same._

_I had known Zack for six months at the time of his death. He’s already been written into the pages of this story—my charming Midwestern boy who called me old mum and carried my bags, let me bum his cigarettes and showed me pictures of his little sisters in the letters that arrived at the base on a monthly basis._

_Molly had trounced him at strip poker on more than one occasion._

_Barely nineteen and raised in a small Catholic town in Ohio, he had been largely apathetic to religion, socialized too heavily in it to remain faithful after his father walked out the door when he was seventeen. Zack was cocky, the kind of boy who knew he was handsome, and turned down a scholarship to play football for Ohio State after a glorious career at a regional high school to join the marines to send money home for his mother and little sisters—the result was a strange and pleasing amalgamation of smugness, pride, and a complete lack of faith in the staying power of his personality._

_Zack craved attention, and knew how to get it._

_Marines write letters to keep on their persons in the event of their death. In the last hours of his life, in a damp, dark cave, Zack decided the one to be sent home to his mother wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t heartfelt enough. Wasn’t funny enough. Just wasn’t enough._

_Fingers shaking, I pulled the letter out of the pocket of his uniform, and struggled to read it with my flashlight as it began to lose power._

_“I need to write something about god,” he said. “My mother would want to know that I found god, if she couldn’t be there. She’d want to know I wasn’t alone.”_

_Weeks earlier, we’d all discussed god._

_“We all die alone,” he had said, and laughed like he didn’t care, like it was a point to prove, showing us the rosary his mother told him to keep with him on duty._

_“Is that what you think?” I asked, more out of habit than anything else, trying to push him into conceding what he was really thinking. I wouldn’t really, but it was only a few of us—Zack, Noah, Danny, and myself. The baby of the group and the village elders, the three of us being the ones he was always trying to impress._

_He shrugged, worrying his fingertips over the prayer beads. “People just pass through.” And then he considering the rosary some more. “If there is a god, I don’t think he has as many rules as people like to think. I don’t think he, or she, I guess, cares that much. And I don’t think they have as much control as people think, to comfort themselves.”_

_“He has to have rules, though,” Danny said, cleaning the lens of the video camera. “Don’t you think?”_

_“I guess.”  He curled his fingers around the long strands of beads, and then tucked them back into the cargo pocket on his left leg. “Seems like a dumb system though. How do we know if you’ve broken one? I’ve heard priests say shit that because someone takes the Lord’s name in vain he gets lung cancer. I’m not a fucking doctor, but I’m pretty sure that one’s on smoking.”_

_Noah paused in bringing his cigarette to his lips, squinted at the red-tipped smoldering end, and shrugged, taking a hit off it anyway. I looked up at him the best I could with my head resting on his shoulder._

_“What? You tell me every day I’m gonna get shot for being a dumbass. Might as well.”_

_I made an indignant noise, taking the cigarette from between his fingers and taking a long drag of it myself. (Embedding had made smokers of all of us. Circumstance and stress in ways I had never encountered before.) “No, I say don’t get shot for being dumbass.”_

_“You still think I’m a dumbass,” Noah groused._

_Zack laughed. “Well, if Mum says it, it must be true, Cap.”_

_“Shut up and go back to your pretentious god discussion,” he ordered, rolling his eyes. “You all need to go to church.”_

_Unlike a lot of us, Noah had never questioned his own faith. Of which I was, I can say, quite jealous, to have a bedrock like religion that will never crumble from underneath you, will be there to keep you from falling. But I’m an Anglican raised in every country except England. Regardless, neither of my parents are especially religious people, and I doubt I would have been one of those children straight-jacketed into tights and taffeta and bundled into a pew every Sunday no matter where we lived._

_So I rolled my eyes at him, Captain Noah Mason from South Georgia. Then again, it was also PFC Zachary Holland from Laurelville, Ohio, population 543 and a hell of a lot of corn and one very domineering Catholic church. But we all react to our circumstances in different ways._

_(Except for war, apparently, which just makes everyone take up smoking.)_

_“Goin’ to Mass was never my problem,” Zack complained, although I could tell he was starting to get uncomfortable. “They practically took attendance in my hometown. One church. Five hundred people. And my Momma was a Sunday School teacher. But seriously though, people don’t get cancer just because they sinned. Pretty sure that’s not what Jesus died for.”_

_“You do well in Sunday School?” I asked, teasing._

_He smirked. “Got a gold star on all my reports.”_

_“Nepotism,” Noah coughed, stubbing out the butt in the dirt._

_Zack pouted._

_“Be nice,” I warned Noah, pinching his leg._

_“Rules though,” Danny reminded us, moving on to taking the camera apart, trying to scrub out the dirt and sand that stubbornly clung to every crevice. “It’s a valid question. I mean, look where the hell we are.”_

_It was strange to look back to my childhood and find the makings of all of this. Remembering late night conversations I’d overheard between my father and other Ambassadors and dignitaries, the complaints passed between embassy staffs in the their native tongues they thought an eight-year-old couldn’t understand, the crease in my father’s brow while he ironed out agreements and stopgaps. I was in Berlin when the wall fell, but it the Cold War was still crumbling in Afghanistan._

_And other things, of course._

_“I think we know we’ve broken one of god’s rules when we can’t put it back together again,” I had said quietly, picking a hole in my pants._

_I couldn’t put Zack back together, or help any of them, really. So, petting his hair, I pulled my notebook from my bag, and flipped to a clean page. “What do you want me to write?”_

On page 78 of the word document, she says that Zack reminded her of Will, and realizes she’s gone 77 pages without writing his name at all. And then she erases it. She may have been first drawn to Zack because of his similarities to Will, but her love for Will does not get to own her affection and grieving for Zack.

_“I want to go home,” he told me when we were done. I couldn’t see much of him, where we were, but his forehead was cool and slicked with sweat under my hand, and I could see, glinting in the low light, blood dribbling from between his lips._

_I kissed his forehead. I’d never really thought of myself as a maternal person, but being around a dozen or so college-aged boys out of the lot had shoehorned me, at times, into the role of den mother. That night, I fulfilled it gladly. “So do I.”_

_“How do you do it?” he asked._

_“Do what?”_

_“Act so brave,” he said, eyes fluttering closed. Where his mother’s rosary was folded between his fingers, I clasped my hand around his._

_“I have nowhere to go home to. I have to be brave,” I answered honestly._

_He frowned up at me, exhaling loudly. It rattled in his chest. “Old mum—”_

_“We’re all here for our own reasons, right?”_

_Nodding at that, he let it pass, eyes glazing over. He didn’t speak for a while after that; by that point he was in and out of consciousness, and Noah and I couldn’t do anything but comb our fingers through his hair, administer the morphine from Tina’s kit, and pray. I found myself feeling out the beads on Mrs. Holland’s rosary, reciting prayers I’d abandoned after secondary school._

_Nominally Anglican, the words aren’t all that different._

_But all I’ve ever learned from religion is that if there is a god, the only way we know if we’ve displeased him is if we can’t put something back together again. Our punishment is being forced to look at the parts of our lives and hold the broken pieces in our hand, knowing that they’ll never fit back together again. Like slavery, and genocide, and dying nineteen year old boys._

_Humans are fragile. Tissues, sinews, bones, hearts._

_In time, Zack groaned, and Noah and I looked over him expectantly. In the corner, Molly and Jim watched warily._

_“I’m gonna go home now,” were Zack’s last words, mumbled and drugged._

_Zack passed quietly, two hours before the medevac arrived. At the end, Noah and I brought him to the back of the cave, where it was warmest, and wrapped him in everything we had. It was an internal bleed—when we palpated his abdomen it was thick and stiff with blood. He had taken a blow to the sternum, cracked his ribs and pierced his liver. He shivered relentlessly, but was beyond pain._

_His body laid on my legs until my thighs were all pins and needles._

_I don’t remember letting go of him._

Sometimes she writes about herself.

She paid for his funeral. She writes that—she sent the letter home to his mother, with one of her own and the rosary. Paid for the funeral, and set up scholarship funds for his sisters. And still emails them, sometimes.

She doesn’t remember Zack’s body being taken away, but she remembers Jim picking her up off the ground and wrapping an arm around her, and how hollow she felt.

That night, after they finally returned to base and she had ushered Jim and Molly into bed—Danny could take care of himself—she and Noah had sat out in the mess, sharing a cigarette.

Mac finds it hard to put who Noah is to her into words.

_I suppose in another time and place, I would have quite happily married  Noah Mason. But that’s not who we could be, then. Instead, he was the first person who heard my story in its entirety, shrugged, and told me that humans are preternaturally disinclined to find the people who are best for them at that moment._

_Or in shorter words—we fuck up._

_I think we both knew that were we not both already heartbroken, it might have worked. If I wasn’t self-loathing and struggling to breathe with the guilt I carried, I could have loved him as more than my person. But we were partners for a time, leaning on each other and taking care of each other. We shared cigarettes and secrets, minded the others, and very occasionally, he dragged me down off of bars in clubs in Germany and held my hair back while I sobbed so hard that I puked._

_We’ve grown apart since, in some ways—in the sense that we no longer frequently talk. But in no way does that lessen our understanding of each other._

_We stayed up that whole night, and I held his hand while he called Zack’s mother and held his hand as he worked his way through a pack of cigarettes, and tried to keep his fingers from shaking while he mainlined caffeine and nicotine. The next morning, they went out on patrol again._

_Molly, Jim, and I cooked them breakfast, and the younger marines greeted me with their customary kiss on the cheek while taking their powdered eggs and heavily salted bacon, fresh bread and instant coffee. Noah lingered, bracing his hands on my hips from behind, and buried his face in my hair._

_He needed a wife._

_That wasn’t who I was to him, but I understood._

_Sometimes I needed a boyfriend. Noah was the person who was the best for me at that moment. And I think, somehow, I was the person who was the best for him. And at times, it was enough to save me from my self-loathing, and actually like myself, allow myself to breathe. To have someone to lean on, someone to be my partner. It wasn’t sexual. Was hardly romantic, each of us lacquered with sweat and packed into Kevlar. We were best friends._

_Noah was like coming up for air._

 

* * *

 

January is moody and cold.

MacKenzie learns that if she drinks enough Jameson while tucked up under her blankets, she can write a thousand words on a weeknight and ten thousand on a weekend.

More words if she’s angry at Will, fewer words if she’s sad.

It takes her weeks to begin to believe that they’re the _right_ words.

 

* * *

 

She spends Valentine’s Day with Molly, who takes the train in from New Jersey and shows up at her door with a sardonic little grin and two bottles of cheap red wine.

“Do you want a copy editor?” she asks from the living room an hour or so later, take out boxes strewn across the floor and coffee table.

_While not petite, per se—standing at tall at five feet, ten inches tall—Molly is still a doe-eyed, willowy girl with soft features and a sweet smile. She speaks with the kind of high clear voice one would expect from a gingery redhead with big blue eyes and a sweet smile, who stands with her hands clasped at her middle, feet splayed like a ballerina’s._

_But it is—and I mean this in the best way possible—a trick. She hides an instinctual skepticism of people by mirroring them. In essence, Molly has mastered the art of cold reading, which makes her an invaluable journalist, in many respects. But her tendency to mirror also makes her almost impossible to get to know._

_She assumed she would be my assistant for the four months I was in Atlanta and then be reassigned once I shipped out. When I asked her to come with me—I think that was the first time I saw something behind the glassy countenance. The second time was during one of her first solo interviews with a UN official who was determined to give her the run around. She dropped the mirror so hard it shattered, switching so suddenly from his friend to a bold and direct interviewer, twisting and bending him to her line of questioning until he had no choice but to concede to answering._

Mac turns from her fridge, and sees that Molly has her laptop open where she left it on the coffee table and is hunched over off the couch, scrolling through her word document, the rim of her wine glass pressed to her chapped and bitten bottom lip.

“Oh, I’m not publishing it.”

_Molly Thompson is going to be a news anchor one day, and a very good one at that. I just have to drag her back from the clutches of print journalism first._

She keeps scrolling, and Mac comes around from her kitchen with her own very large glass of wine in hand to collapse into the couch next to her. Peering over her shoulder, she sees that Molly’s in the middle of the story of how she had to teach Jim how to sew a button after the one at the fly of his last pair of pants tore off in the middle of five day excursion into the mountains. And then she scrolls down to the four of them making shadow puppets in a cave, Molly directing Jim’s hands into something wickedly naughty, Jim whining.

(Danny had it, as usual, on video. And Mac knows she looks haggard, in most of the footage, most of the pictures—strung out, eyes dim, hair a mess—but maybe it worked because none of them expected her to be happy, even if all Jim and Molly wanted to do was please her.

Sometimes they made her happy anyway.)

Molly skips ahead a dozen or so pages, landing them in the middle of hearing that they had won a Peabody. Another jump, and they’re stuck in the Green Zone, huddled in a closet while shells explode outside their door, Molly humming Gershwin to keep herself sane and Mac stroking her hair.

It’s strange to think that Molly is only a year older than Maggie.  

“You could,” she says, wine glass still pressed against her lips, eyes moving rapidly across the screen. “It’s needs—I mean, I can tell it’s stream of consciousness. But if you edited it so it moved in a more linear fashion, is what I’m saying. I could put you in contact with my agent. I mean, I know you know people—”

Mac glares at her, firm, and Molly gives her back a sheepish but not-at-all-ready-to-concede sort of smile. As if Molly being an expert manipulator wasn’t a part of why Mac liked her in the first place.

“I’m just saying, is all,” Molly continues, starting to laugh, starting to drop the act. “You need footnotes.”

Mac leans forward and tries to close the lid of her computer, but Molly steals it away before she’s able, sliding to the end of the couch and setting her glass down onto the end table with a _clink_ , giggling.

“You are the nosiest,” Mac sighs, contemplating her wine before taking a large gulp.

“I ran your life for three years, old habits die hard.” Molly flashes her her biggest _I don’t give a fuck, I’m going to be a little shit_ smile, the one that’s all teeth and gums, lips static and pulled wide. “Has Jim seen this?”

Hell, she hasn’t even told Jim about it. Noah, yes. Molly knows now because she’s a snoop. Her therapist, of course.

“No,” she answers.

Molly raises her eyebrows, pursing her lips together before looking back down at the screen, her mouth shaping itself into a smile again. “Oh Jesus, Frankie and Jim’s obsession with _Stacy’s Mom_.”   

Those are three weeks of her life that she’s never getting back. There are some songs that just aren’t wanting acoustic versions.

_“It’s not about what you want, Mac. It’s about what you need,” Jim said, lying back onto one of the card tables in the mess, plucking out a bare-bones version of the song’s melody. Frankie began to sing along with him soulfully, until Molly kicked in the legs of the table so it collapsed under them._

_I shrugged, going back to my crossword. “At least it’s not Wonderwall_. _”_

_Rolling on to the floor, Jim tried to adjust his guitar. “Well, here’s—”_

_“You’re fired.”_

Leaning back against the couch, Mac has the perfect vantage point to watch Molly seeking out random pages in the word document, and wonders why she hasn’t commented on any of the more difficult things that she’s written, dredged up the deaths or shoot-outs or nights spent huddled together, praying for back-up.

And then Mac realizes that Molly is deliberately scanning for the happier moments they had when embedded.

Molly’s trying to cheer them both up.

“Aw, you included the List for Life.” Mac snorts. That was a shit show of long manic nights, deadlines, personal and professional fuck ups, all recorded into a Mead notebook. A survival guide, she thinks she called it, for the sleep-deprived, overworked, and socially awkward. “Simpler times, when everything had a rule. _Number 472: No selling your subordinates into bondage, including but not limited to marriage, for the sake of securing a source._ Oh, Jim. He was so whiny about that.”

“He should have studied his Urdu harder,” she muses. Everything was much higher stakes back then; the statute of limitations on when you could start finding things funny was short. Irreverence was just how they coped.

Will doesn’t do irreverent. At least not where her mistake is concerned. He does flippant and angry, but never irreverent.  

A gale of laughter escapes Molly’s lips, and Mac looks up to see her putting an index finger between her teeth, crinkling her nose. “I forgot about the time we had a wet tee shirt contest.”

_Oh god._

“With approximately a dozen other marines.” They’d been in Kandahar, out walking the rounds with the marines, and it had started to pour. By the time they returned to base their tee shirts—pilfered white men’s undershirts—had soaked through. Rather than leering, Frankie and Johnno had stripped and joined them, boasting that their abs were more impressive than what was in Molly’s sports bra. “And we _lost_.”

“Don’t we have a picture of that?” Molly asks, looking up, eyes brightening. “You should put in pictures. Hunky marines sell. Marine Corporals Francis Delgado and John O’Connell. And my Major Noah Mason.”

Mac nods along appeasingly, rolling her eyes.

“I’m not _publishing anything_ , Mol- _ly_.” Mac won’t say it’s something her therapist suggested; Molly’s looking to ameliorate her loneliness tonight as much as she is herself, and if she mentions it’s a coping mechanism Molly will put up the mirror. Besides. “It’s—I mean, don’t you want some of things that happened to you over there to, you know, _not_ be read about by complete strangers? You have a name, Molly—a Peabody, a Pulitzer, a PhD.”

Her lips quirk into a small frown. “I don’t mind,” she answers, like Mac should already know. “I trust you.”

She shakes off the frown, grinning brightly again.

 _Here we go._  

“And it’s a _book_ , Kenzie.”

 

* * *

 

Will comes in the next day with a hickey on his neck, so Mac spends her morning hiding in her office. Most of the day, actually. With a brief excursion to have lunch with Charlie, and then take Maggie on a walk (a checkup, on her, really) to Starbucks after that. Then an hour-long meeting with graphics, and a half hour in an editing bay with Tamara and Tess.

“I could take dental impressions off his neck. Which would be a shame, because then they could be used to identify her body,” is Sloan’s way of greeting her when she gets back.

“I’m fine, Sloan.”

And she kind of is, in a way. She and Molly drank so much last night that all they could do was lay on her bed and giggle, sifting through pictures from their time as embeds, after watching some of the footage from their less stellar moments, an outtakes reel that Danny had edited together years ago… which had turned into the drinking game which had left them unable to sit up.

(One sip for: Mac and Noah parenting someone, Molly not so subtly hiding her crush on Noah, Jim flubbing his name on camera, someone sleeping on someone else in an uncomfortable position, Noah putting his hands on his hips, Danny ducking out of frame.

Two sips for: Belting out a song at 3 AM to stay awake, Molly and Mac miming at each other from across a room, Jim and his guitar, Noah chugging coffee, Frankie gets another tattoo, Zack carrying something for Mac.

Finish your drink for: a google alert for Will McAvoy, Molly rolling her eyes at the google alert, Jim being oblivious of the google alert and... somebody gets injured and gives the camera a thumbs up.)

_I think we all knew that Molly’s steadfast determination to pair me with Noah was just misdirection on her own part. Except, of course, Noah himself. And then there was misdirection on our part—being one of a handful of women in a marine outpost has its own dangers. He didn’t like the politics of it, but Noah often expressed interest in me as a way of getting the others to leave me alone. Like I said, we were both dealing with our own heartbreak. And honestly, even removing how he would go out of his way to treat me in front of certain officers and Sergeants, we might have been mistaken as a couple anyway._

_I’m not entirely certain when that changed. It must have happened so slowly that Noah and Molly were halfway a couple before any of us noticed. But with the clock ticking down before the four of us would be re-assigned to Islamabad, the two of them finally dropped their acts._

_Noah carrying Molly through base bridal style after she sprained her ankle jumping down off a Jeep wasn’t anyone’s idea of subtle…_

And then spent at least half an hour laughing about how the first time Noah had proposed, it had been three hours before their transport was due to leave, and with a ring made of tinfoil. And then snorting at Molly’s proposed DEFCON system for shit that would get Will into the tabloids, and the time Molly broke Mac’s BlackBerry instead of letting her see Will on the beach with Erin Andrews.

“You need to have some revenge sex,” Sloan suggests, which isn’t too far off from Molly’s “fucking ESPN Barbie.” Although Sloan would never suggest that she stop “wasting time pining over tall, blonde, and Midwestern and try stacked, brunette, and southern.”

Nor would Sloan ever call Will a “five” and suggest that she could “hook herself a ten.”

(Molly never really found a reason to _hold back_ , unless Mac was well and truly upset.)

“He’s not,” Mac answers, rounding from where Sloan sits in front of her desk to behind it, sitting. “He is allowed to _date_. He is allowed to _move on_.”

Sloan continues on, unimpeded.

“No. Not really. He’s an idiot. And have you seen what she buys him? He’s wearing a—a tan sweater of doom or something, today.” Mac lifts her eyebrows almost into her bangs, but doesn’t deny that Will did dress better when Nina wasn’t purchasing additions to his wardrobe. “Revenge sex. Someone who would really get at Will—oh, do we still have Lonny’s number? He was kind of into you. What ever happened to Will having a bodyguard?”

Sloan looks off into the bullpen, eyebrows pinched together.

“Will paid more to cover the insurance premiums so he wouldn’t need one,” starts, vaguely remembering a conversation they had back in August. And then shakes her head. “Not the point. I don’t want to have revenge sex. With anyone. Or Lonny.” She doesn’t want sex at all, really. It’s not worth it. Wade made her feel empty, she learned her lesson. But still, she tries to lift a corner of her mouth into a smile for Sloan. “He’d probably crush me.”

Sloan doesn’t look so convinced.  

“Okay…”

Mac sighs, pulling apart the newspaper on her desk by section before dragging out her notes from the 11 o’clock rundown. When she looks up again, Sloan is still giving her the same pitying look that people have taken to wearing around her for months now.

(Well, not everyone. Jim knows the routine, even if he doesn’t know that she’s burying herself in their time as embeds to keep busy.

Is she running? Is Will running?

Have they just gotten to the point where they’re running away from each other?)

“Stop looking at me like I’m about to fling myself off the balcony,” Mac protests. “Am I jealous? Yes. Am I miserable? A little, for a few hours a day. Am I going to be an adult about this? Yes.”

Sloan laughs. “You called her ‘the Gossip Girl’ the other day.”

Mac tries not to laugh, but fails, and then regroups, pointing her highlighter in Sloan’s direction. “That’s different, he wasn’t thirty feet from me when I said it.”

“We were in Hang Chews, with the staff.” Jim’s been dragging her out after broadcast, and recently Maggie and the rest of the girls have gotten in on the game, and where she and Will used to seclude themselves near the front, the staff sits her down in the couches and around her. “Well, they arguably started it with ‘the Wicked Witch of the Lower West Side,’ so—”

But honestly, it’s one thing outside the workplace.

“Don’t you have a show in half an hour?” Mac says, cutting her off. “Zane’s going to—”

Sloan pauses, eyes focused on a space of air a foot or two in front of her face, before nodding, and standing. “Right.”  

She follows Sloan to the door, giving her a tight smile when she leaves. Quietly, she shuts the door to her office, but not before catching Jim’s eye from across the bullpen.

He gives her a cheesy smile, and she rolls her eyes back, giving him a thumbs up.

_I’m injured, but I’m fine. That’s what it means, and it started the first time we got caught in something. We had been in Peshawar for a month, and the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines were assigned as security for a meeting between FATA leaders and a Marine General. An incendiary device went off outside the perimeter, where I had been talking to a few marines taking a cigarette break._

_Jim and Molly were closest to it. As I ran to them, another went off, and I pitched down to the ground as hard as I could, getting the air knocked out of me. When the smoke cleared, I realized we’d all gotten hit. Molly took shrapnel to the arm where she’d shielded her face, Jim to his shoulder, myself to the calf. They could stand, I couldn’t. The most I could do was give them a thumbs up before moaning and curling up into a ball._

_It became what we did. It didn’t matter how bad we were hurt. If we brushed it off, laughed it off, told each other we were okay, then we were okay. Molly hitting her head, spraining her ankle. Jim getting shot in the ass. Danny having a roof fall in on him. It could be worse. Almost getting killed in Karachi, the near hostage situation. We were rattled, but we had to be strong. And believe me, I’d have given anything to be weak and foolish, given anything to break down. But I couldn’t allow myself, wouldn’t allow myself. I trudged on because I believed I didn’t deserve the pain, buried it deep and did my job._

_Even when I was stabbed; there’s footage of me, in a morphine haze in a hospital bed in Germany, giving Danny a thumbs up with the heart monitor clipped to my index finger._

 

* * *

 

She’s not coming undone.

She’s had the right words all along.

It hurts, but she’s still standing.

By page 164 it’s a book, no longer _therapy.docx_ , something she does for her therapist and for herself. It’s her book, even if it doesn’t have a title. It’s her book, a part of herself that she’s letting go.

 

* * *

 

“Why does he even like her?” Noah asks, having caught her on Skype very late in the evening her time and at the start of the workday in his, in Stuttgart. Mac sits up in bed, readjusting her laptop so she’s giving Noah something besides a view of her cleavage.

She shakes her head, barely pausing in her typing. “Gentlemen prefer blondes.”

“No, seriously,” he looks up at her over his reading glasses, not satisfied with her deflection. Neither of them are in a war anymore, she notes. And now Noah rides a desk for voicing his opinion too many times (she wonders, often, why he doesn’t just retire, but Mac supposes there’s honor in staying with seeing a losing battle to its end) and she does broadcasts where she and Will pass barely twenty words to each other before he slips out at the end of broadcast. It’s a blessing, really, that he won’t bring Nina to the newsroom.

She tries to ignore Noah’s stare in the box in the corner of her laptop screen. “Kenzie—”

“Nina doesn’t question him,” she answers shortly, attenuating her syllables into sharp little exhalations of air.

“What?”

“I push him. She doesn’t,” Mac says, trying to sound dispassionate. And then she sighs. “She’s safe, she encourages him to be the man he was three years ago, validates who he was before I was back in the picture. Who he’d be if I left again. Who he _might be_ if I left again.”

“Are you going to?”

She _might_ leave again. Her contract is up next April.

Making a high-pitched noise of distress, she buries her face in her hands again, before slotting open her fingers to peer through at Noah’s face on the screen. The expression he wears is distinctly one of concern, but it’s not worn in a way that crowds her.

Brian hasn’t been the first or last person to ask her if Will is ever going to _come back_.

 _“_ He’s a grown man, Noah,” she says, voice muffled by her hands. This is good though, she thinks. Maybe it’s good that Will’s with Nina, its good he was with Erin Andrews. Because if he can be happy with them, then there’s nothing left to fix. “He doesn’t have to love me. He doesn’t have to want to be with someone who wants him to be the best he can be. He can be with someone who enables him, and enjoy it. He can love her. He can even marry her.”

Noah doesn’t look as convinced, tapping his pen restlessly while reading his way through a file. “What about you?”

“I can leave,” MacKenzie says, like she believes it. In the abstract, it works: she sells her apartment, and packs up her things. She takes a job elsewhere, and leaves the job in someone else’s hands. Jim is almost as old as she was when she first EP’d _News Night._ And maybe if _News Night_ and Will weren’t the beginning and end of her career as an executive producer, it could be less of an abstract.

Will wouldn’t even be surprised, she thinks. She’s never stayed anywhere for more than three years at a time.

Noah gives her one of his strange little laughs, the kind he gave her when she first showed an adeptness for sparring, and drinking whiskey, and being able to sit through getting a tattoo on her ribs without so much as squirming once. “Is that what this is, then? Your exit strategy?”

“My—”

Pride, is what it is.

And she hordes it, the pride that Noah has in her. Because it’s so unlike the pride Will has in her, in her work, in her capabilities as a producer. Noah brokers in different parts of her soul, pieces she at first refused to share with Will out of what she thought was deference to him, to what she did. Now MacKenzie thinks she doesn’t show Will because those three years are not the woman he fell in love with.

It’s a large part of her problem, she knows—she’s not the woman he fell in love with eight years ago. Regardless, the woman who he fell in love with eight years ago cheated on him. In the end, Mac thinks, it hardly matters who she is, or isn’t.

Will has Nina.

Perhaps she stayed away too long, allowed herself to be molded into a new shape that doesn’t fit against him anymore. But he’s changed too.

Noah, used to filling in the gaps in their conversations, keeps talking. “Well, I couldn’t turn up anything for you on that Operation Genoa, and you thought—”

“I know.” And now Genoa is tabled.  And her… _book_ , well. (Memoir?) She doesn’t know if she wants to publish it. But she could, and probably live off the profits for a little while.

She gets a strange sort of glee, thinking about Will reading it. Reading all of the shit she put herself through, all the fucked up things she did. She knows the manuscript would sell. Her name has already sold tabloids. So has his, thousands of copies more, and the thought of him buying her book, the thought of him sending his agent, or his agent’s assistant, to buy the book…

God, she still wants to _hurt_ him. Push him away and take ownership of it this time. What the fuck does that make her?  

No. She won’t.

Noah looks at her expectantly through the computer monitor.

“Yes, it’s my… exit strategy.” But it’s more than a book. There’s a goal, here. _Sift through your own wreckage._ “I just left, last time. Ran away. I want to be able to leave without wanting to come back. Without thinking that I owe him anything. I want to be able to leave without running away.”

“Are you considering leaving?” he asks, and Mac realizes she’s suggested it, with a degree of certainty, twice, in less than ten minutes. “Seriously? Because I don’t have to tell you that your German is far better than mine, and Stuttgart in spring is the perfect place to wait out the aftermath of the publishing of a tell-all book. He won’t be able to reach you in Germany, I promise, I have a ton of men with guns and there are fences and stuff.”

“Guns and fences and _stuff_ ,” she muses, although the idea of Will trying to gain access to her fortress and being denied entrance is the kind of image she’s needed, recently, when she’s been denied so much of him.

“And then you can take me on all the vacations we would talk about when we were sleeping in holes in the ground,” he says, jabbing his pen at the lens of his webcam. And Mac remembers. Nights on the cold, damp ground, looking up at the stars, unable to sleep. Greece, they had eventually decided on, watching grey wisps of their breath reaching upwards. Mac sighs, watching the expression on his face change, and knows he’s about to change the conversational thread. “But _can_ you leave? I know what it did to you last time.”

Swallowing hard, she stares somewhere between her laptop screen and her keyboard, fingers roving restlessly over her keys. Looking at what she’s just typed, she swallows again.

_It was entirely Molly’s idea, and at twenty-two, she was to be rarely denied any of her flights of fancy. She and Jim often found themselves lumped in with the younger of the marines, with Noah and I shepherding them here and there. So on occasion, we indulged them._

_When we were in Stuttgart for Christmas 2008, Molly decided she wanted a tattoo. How Jim, Danny, and I got talked into getting matching tattoos with her, I’ll never be entirely certain, but there is definitely a three-inch in diameter compass rose etched into the skin over my right ribs that isn’t going away anytime soon. Either way, I was the woman who sent herself all the way to warzone after a bad breakup when most women just get a dramatic haircut, or go blonde. A tattoo was quickly becoming among the lesser of the things that I had done._

_I realize, of course, this doesn’t explain the next three that I decided to get over the course of the next two years._

The compass rose under her right arm, Pink Floyd lyrics on her left ribs, under her breast, the tarot card on her left hip, and the tiny butterfly perched on the scar from her knife wound. Tattoos are the least of her secrets from Will. Well, not secrets, she amends. She wrote him emails—the _secrets_ she keeps from him are done so at his own choosing, too.

“Maybe…” She takes a breath, and Noah waits, patiently filling out paperwork. She has to start saying these things out loud to people other than her therapist, and Noah is the best place to start; Molly is too young, Jim works for both of them, Danny has just gotten his chance to start over himself. No, it’s always been her, and Noah. “Maybe he’s no longer the person I need, the person who makes me the best version of me, and I need to let go.”

“Maybe?”

Considering dropping her head back into her hands, all MacKenzie _can_ do it is give a dry laugh. How long ago had she been forcing Noah into doing this himself? _Do you think Molly cares that you have baggage? Do you think that maybe Molly doesn’t care that she’s young, that she could get whoever she wants? She wants you, and pushing her away isn’t doing either of you any good._

And it isn’t like they haven’t spoken about his first wife, the divorce.

Leaning back against her pillows, she groans, screwing her face up at him when he lifts an eyebrow at her.

“I still think he’s the person I need,” Mac says, her voice sounding too forlorn to her own ears; the conversation is starting to feel like picking at a scab. “But I don’t know if he’s the person who’s best for me. And I don’t know if I’m just saying that because I’m hurt, and because I’m jealous—”

He cuts her off there.

“Are _you_ still the person he needs? The person who is best for him?”

“Yes,” she replies without thinking.

“Do you think he will ever forgive you and let you be that person? Not if it’s fair, not if you understand that he can’t—do you think he will ever forgive you?”

Mac opens and closes her mouth around a few attempts at an answer, trying to mold her thoughts into something coherent and objective at 3 AM.

“I don’t know anymore,” she settles on. Which hurts, like a festering sort of wound, like the scab picked, because around the time of the September 11th broadcast, she was so sure. And even a bit after. Back when they were still playing games over the voicemail, and then she had to go and ruin it. “So I have an… exit strategy. Should I need one.” Biting her lip, she looks up at her ceiling, and then out at Times Square through her window. “I just feel so shitty about it.”

“You’re allowed to try to keep yourself from getting hurt.” He won’t say what he wants to until she’s looking at his face on the screen. Stalling for a few more seconds, wedging her teeth against her bottom lip, she tries to focus her eyes out on the fluorescent billboards before looking at her laptop again. He waits, and she nods. “You’re allowed to not need his forgiveness. You’re allowed to move on.”

And then it breaks.

Tamping her hand over her mouth, she tries to push it all back, but cries heave up from her chest.

“I don’t want to.”

Reclaiming, and letting go.

Sifting through her own wreckage; it’s her and Will, and then it’s her own stabbing, and Nina’s Pakistan story (if that doesn’t hurt enough already, it’s tied up in _Nina fucking Howard_ , now), and Zack’s death and the explosions and sleepless nights they spent under cover, praying for shelter to hold, praying for dawn to come.

She can’t live like this, among the rubble of her life.

And unless Will wants to fix it, that’s all it’ll remain, and she’s losing faith in their friendship, now. Their professional partnership.

_If you take it apart, what does it become? Which pieces are broken, which pieces are whole? Which do you hold onto, and which do you let go?_

Sleep is escaping her, and she remembers, last time. Three years of sleep deprivation plus emotional and physical trauma and the nervous breakdown that sent her home. The failed psych evaluation and with it, her personal failures were lumped in with her professional ones.

Until Charlie’s phone call.

She wants him; MacKenzie McHale will always love Will McAvoy. It’s tried and tested and she’s endured every stupid thing and she’ll keep enduring. Because it’s what she does, now.

It hurts, but she doesn’t know how to learn to do the alternative and she’s started to _want to_.

Noah sighs, and she knows that he will be gentle with her. “I… I know.”

He stays on the call until she falls asleep.

 

* * *

 

She can pinpoint the exact week she stopped assuming she would make it out the warzones alive.

Her own emails to Will have become her best source.

They hurt, but she reads them and takes them back. Reading them makes them hers, for her, for this thing that she’s writing. Some are hastily written, dropped adverbs and strange syntax; others are mechanical, tightly-scripted recitations of the day’s events, of shootings and deaths and IEDs. Bodies gone unrecovered, hands gone cold. Each punctuated with explanations and apologies.

Some aren’t as bad, some make her laugh.

_No one laughs at god in a war. Jim got shot in the arse today though, and that was pretty funny. Nothing large, 9 mm from a pretty long distance. Molly and I held his hands while the medic took it out. It was an unlucky turn, but we’ve all just decided to keep telling him he should be grateful he wasn’t facing the other direction._

_He’s a good kid. They’re all good kids. He brings me coffee every morning, and thinks I take it black. But it’s fine. I’ve gotten used to it. You should see me now._

So she takes those back, too, because god knows she needs to smile more.

But then the others—

She’s drinking merlot from the bottle on a Friday night when she finds her emails to Will. Eventually they’re cross-referenced with stories they filed, and footage, a few pictures, and MacKenzie honestly can’t figure out _why_ then. There was no trauma, no pebble to launch the landslide. It was just something that… happened.

_Some of the guys here are on their third tours of duty. I’ve been here fourteen months; no idea how they cope with it. Even if they don’t agree with what they’re doing here, even if they’ve only signed up to feed their families, there’s this sense of timelessness to them, barely thinking farther than the order they’re following, to getting to the end of the mission, before hitting some sort of mental reset button. It’s like they exist in a land between the living and the dead, hitting reset over and over again. Death is easier to cope with when what you’re living doesn’t have consequences._

_Lately I’ve started to understand how they feel._

It was easier, in a time where she felt like she had nowhere to go home to. London, to her parents, yes, but she’d never lived in England. She’d be better off in Greece or Russia or Germany, but she would have given anything to be welcome in New York. And maybe that’s why she had believed Charlie so easily when he’d told her Will wanted her to come back to her old position at _News Night_.

But for so long Manhattan, going home, was a door closed on her.

It was easier to stop dwelling on going home, to hit reset.

And MacKenzie knows she did it after she came back, too. The contract she signed, giving Will the right to fire her at the end of every business week, just gave her a new starting point.

Make it to Friday, reset.

_She’s irreverent to consequences._

 

* * *

 

She talks to her therapist about it, the next time she sees her. Every Wednesday morning at 9AM, in Dr. Laura Eisenberg’s office on the thirty-sixth floor of a midtown sky rise.

The first twenty-five minutes is spent with her worrying out loud about Maggie, and the possible ramifications of Genoa, that stress. And then when she sees the clock inching towards the halfway mark, she makes herself bring up what Noah said, what she’s been writing about, thinking about.

 _Running away._ And she feels so guilty, still. About what she did with Brian, and then leaving, and then coming back. Wade. Hurting Will, again and again.

Some nights she lays in bed and looks up at the ceiling and wonders _what if I had died_ , before dragging herself away from the idea that _that_ would be her penance paid.

“I think I’m doing it again.”

Laura’s corner office is two walls of floor-to-ceiling windows; Mac walks along one of them, watching midtown west rush off to their morning meetings. It’s the middle of March, and the sidewalks are dotted with women in brightly-colored spring jackets, men with umbrellas tucked under their arms. The weather this morning called for rain, but none has come yet.

“You’re allowed your coping mechanisms,” Laura counters, pen scratching over the legal pad she takes notes on. Mac knows she’s drawing, not actually writing anything down. It’s strangely calming.

“I don’t want to have to cope.” Pressing a fingertip to the cool glass, she pauses, and reconsiders. “I feel like I’m stunting myself.”

“How so?”

She chooses her words carefully. “I’m wondering if it’s not just another version of running away. If it’s—Noah called it an exit strategy. And I’ve been thinking about it, since. What if he’s not wrong?”

“Do you want to run?” Laura asks, in a way that is both conversational but not at all, frowning at the sketch on her notepad. Mac likes Laura; she’s unassuming, but still blunt.

Mac turns, folding her arms under her chest, chewing on her bottom lip. “Yes. No. There are people here—Jim, he followed me here. I wouldn’t leave him behind—Charlie, Sloan, Don, Maggie, _god_ , Maggie. The staff, I can’t just walk out, we have Genoa that we’re sitting on and they _trust_ me—”

And because anytime her thoughts start spinning like a whirligig, Laura knows how to pull out the right piece to get them to stop. “Do you feel tied down by them?”

“No, of course not,” she answers immediately. She wants to be in the newsroom with them. The staff is—the staff is family.

“You didn’t mention Will in your list,” Laura points out, before reaching for the thick manila file where Mac knows the shortlist on her neuroses is kept. Running her tongue along the front of her teeth, Laura thumbs through it quickly, finding the piece of information that she wants. “In your file it says the first time you left, it was easy. There was no one else in New York to stay for. You didn’t have many friends. That before Will, most of your friends were Brian’s, so when you two broke it off—”

Mac nods along. “I lost most, all, of my friends.”

Laura turns the page. “And because you didn’t disclose your relationship with Will to HR—”

“I wasn’t your typical celebrity girlfriend, no,” Mac finishes quickly, starting to pace along the windows. “And he wasn’t a celebrity then, not really. He didn’t sign his first million dollar contract until after I left, didn’t get the kind of audience he has now until after I left, didn’t get invited to the parties—”

Laura gently, but with firm tone of voice, reroutes the conversation. “I mean that you couldn’t really go out. And didn’t. So you never replaced those friends, and couldn’t get too close to anyone at work, either. So when you left, all you left was Will. But now you have a family, of sorts. A home.”

“I suppose—yes.”

“And you built it.”

That’s not entirely—

“Well, Will too—”

Laura gives her a quieting look over the rim of her tortoise shell wayfarers. “It didn’t exist until you came back and hand-picked a staff.” Mac stops, and stares, and Laura continues. “Are you—like you said, are you the person they need? The person who makes them the best versions of themselves?”

“I let Jim go to New Hampshire and I let Maggie go to Uganda, so no, probably not.” Just like how she let Molly and Dan convince her to let them all go on the supply trip from Murree to Lakki Marwat, even when she knew the risks. And she should have known, then, and there’s no one to blame but herself. She was their field producer. It was her job to say no, just like it was her job to say no to Jim and Maggie.

(God, the fucking Pakistan story. It still makes her want to throw up to know that Reese and Nina were hacking her phone so far back that they got a voicemail from Molly—she thinks it must have been Molly—about it. The documents were confidential, Noah assured her. Even if they were no longer embedded with his unit he would make sure they were… there’s no other fucking way.

Will had to choose _Nina Howard_.

Out of all the women in journalism…)

“Could you leave?” Laura asks, jolting her out of her thoughts.

“What?”

“If you wanted—could you? Could the show go on without you?”

She opens and closes her mouth around her own self-doubts. “Of course. I trained them so it could.”

“Did you do that so you could run?” she’s asked in return.

“No,” Mac replies immediately. “I did it because I wanted to. I did it for the same reason I took Jim and Molly with me.”

“Loyalty,” Laura simplifies, rimming her mouth with the capped end of her pen.

“Yes, loyalty.”

 _I’m crazy about loyalty._ That only came around after Will. The family, the friends, the loyalty. It’s among the wreckage, but it’s something that she’s holding onto. It’s hard to think that something good came out of her and Will falling apart.

“To Will. The one thing you perceived that you lacked.” Mac stops pacing again, contemplates the chair catty-corner to the couch. “Which is why you’re so hard on yourself now, about running. Do you think you owe him? What—five years later, now?”

“Almost six,” Mac corrects. “Six in June.”

“ _Do you_ think you owe him?”

She makes herself say it; they’ve been working on this, week after week. Since Nina started. Since the writing started. “No. I don’t think I owe him for that. I owe my staff, to be a good boss. I owe it to Will to be his friend, although, I don’t know if I am anymore. His friend. Either way I owe it to him to be a good EP. And I think— _besides_ what’s happened to Maggie, I think I’m doing a good job.”

Laura nods, taking down actual notes.

(That’s when Mac knows they’ve reached the ‘has stopped bullshitting’ part of the session.)

“But you think you’re stunting yourself?”

“I find myself living day to day a lot, writing instead of—I’m just—I’m lonely.” She folds her arms under her chest again, swallowing down a deep breath. “And I have friends now, here and outside of New York, but I’m lonely.”

Laura nods. “You want a partner. That’s normal. Healthy, even, to a want a partner. Romantically, platonically, however. And Will, even though he’s out of reach, romantically, he’s been your partner. Now he’s Nina’s.” In the pause after that sentence (Laura does that, ducking her head into her notepad, letting things sink in that never really ask for her to react openly) Mac dips her chin, and turns to look out onto the pavement again. Laura’s not wrong. “So you think you’re falling back into old coping mechanisms?”

Mac rapt her knuckles softly against the window before turning back to Laura, jerking her head in a way that connotes the affirmative.

“The last time you felt like running, you ran and you didn’t look back. You didn’t even look forward.” Laura bites her lip, tucking her legs up under her, trying to decide the best way to say what she’s thinking. “MacKenzie, a healthy person doesn’t make the decision to run away to a warzone for twenty-six months to punish herself for a bad breakup.”

She doesn’t continue until Mac nods. And they’ve been over this, it’s nothing new.

“I’d wager that even before your breakup with Will that you were depressed. You didn’t have a lot of friends, and you were the youngest executive producer in broadcast news for a headlining show, and you had a boyfriend with severe mental health issues.”

Mac can feel Laura’s eyes following her when she at last crosses the room and takes a seat across from her, folding her hands into her lap, focusing her eyes on her cuticles.  

“You were under an immense amount of stress, and you still are. You’re just better at dealing with it. You’re doing better. Two years ago you were in the middle of a manic phase at the tail-end of a nervous breakdown that you’d been putting off for god knows how long.” Laura gives her a small laugh, warm and encouraging. “Well, you probably do.”

Dropping her head towards her lap, Mac almost laughs with her.

“You want a better coping mechanism? You already have it, and you’re already doing it. Investing in your people. _Invest in your friends_. Hold onto _them_. Spend less time writing at home in bed. You’re doing a really great thing with your writing—start transferring it to your real life, find what you want to hold onto. You’re not just at _News Night_ for Will. And you can’t just exist to do the news.”

“Yeah.”

“I know you think it’s the only thing you’re good at.”

MacKenzie nods.

“And if you do decide to leave—at this point, I don’t think it’d be running away. Mac, you’re planning your future and you’re realizing that maybe it doesn’t have Will McAvoy in it, _which is why_ you keep hitting the reset button.” Again, Laura lets it sink in, flipping through a thick ream of paper in her chart. She licks her lips before reading out from it. “It says here, in the excerpt you emailed me yesterday— _Opening a door to the possibility of death inched closed the door that reminded me that I had no home to go back to. A home that wasn’t lost to a hurricane or flood, but to my own folly. A home that wasn’t a place, but a person who had every right to never forgive me for my actions._ That’s not what you’re doing now, Mac. Back then it wasn’t a choice, that’s what you had, to cope.”

Mac connects the dots, before commenting, half-sardonically. “So you’re saying I should _open the door to my future?_ ”

“Not in that prose,” Laura says, lip curling the tiniest bit; they both laugh, and Laura’s expression softens. This is one of their better sessions, she doesn’t feel as small as she usually does.

Often she leaves her therapy appointments struggling to reassemble herself into something large enough to be the boss of a staff of over a hundred, large enough to manage a control room, a conference room.

“Just… coping mechanisms exist outside of what we’re coping with. What you’re running from this time is different. And you’re not getting shot at by the Taliban, so… but sooner or later you’re going to have to make a decision. Not saying you can’t revisit that decision, but make it. Your life will be easier, even if you’re not necessarily _happier_.”

“So your advice is to go to lunch with a head hunter?”

A smile splits Laura’s face, and she shrugs, twirling a lock of black hair around her finger. “I mean, if it’s a free meal…”

Mac laughs. It’d probably be a better way than revenge sex to make Will jealous, but she couldn’t do that to Charlie, or the staff.

Laura looks down at her watch. “Hour’s up. Have a good day at work.”

 

* * *

 

His father dies the next week, and she puts him in the car after broadcast, lingering on the sidewalk in front of the AWM building long after his driver pulls away.

_No one’s laughing at god when they’re saying their goodbyes._

Will never got closure.

And for the first time in months, she felt like his partner tonight. He looked at her helplessly when she smiled sadly down at him at the curb, seemed like he wanted to ask her for more, but he was the one who put up boundaries.

This isn’t on her. She’s his executive producer, and that’s all.

And tonight, it hurt him more than it hurt her.

So she inhales one more deep breath of spring air, and heads back up to their floor to clean up after Maggie’s fuckup with the Trayvon Martin 911 tape and talk to Charlie about this new piece in the Genoa puzzle.

 

* * *

 

By Monday it’s apparent that none of the tabloids have gotten wind of his father’s death (Mac thinks they have Nina to thank for that, and she’s honestly relieved) which is a sigh within the newsroom, because Will doesn’t want to go to the funeral and doesn’t need sympathy tweets or cards or any of that other bullshit, and she tells the staff to carry on as usual when she gets into the office early that morning.

Maggie stops by her office first, carding her fingers through blonde hair that looks like it needs to be brushed. “I just wanted say again, I’m sorry that—”

“It happens, Maggie.”

_I nearly got four people killed. Six, including you and Gary._

Maggie tries to smile, gesturing with the coffee cup in her hand. “Anyway, I brought you coffee. I asked Jim how you like it—anyway. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

She crosses from her door to her desk in a stilted gait, carefully placing the Starbucks cup on her blotter. Mac knows ACN has a company policy about seeing one of the clinical psychologists for a mandatory twelve sessions following an event like what happened in Uganda, but she doesn’t think Maggie has seen anyone since completing them. She isn’t quite sure how to go about suggesting that Maggie continue seeing someone, and she’d give her Laura’s card but she’s pretty sure that her swanky psychiatrist is a bit out of Maggie’s price range.

“I believe you,” Mac does say, in what she hopes is a reassuring tone of voice.

Unlike herself, Maggie learns from her mistakes instead of stumbling into them again and again and letting others repeat them under her advisement.

Maggie looks surprised though.

“You do?”

“You only make that mistake once. Or, well, the good ones do. But you’re on the of the good ones, Maggie. Otherwise you wouldn’t still be here.” She takes a sip of the coffee—Starbuck’s strongest blend, no milk, two sugars. The way Jim makes her coffee. Smiling conspiratorially (and a bit tiredly, she didn’t sleep well this weekend and Will didn’t call her at all) she gives Maggie a task that will hopefully make her morning a bit better. “Can you do me a favor and make sure Neal isn’t staffing the book out to Jenna again?”

 

* * *

 

An hour later, Maggie comes back into her office with a look of concerned confusion on her face.

“So, I used to be Will’s assistant,” she says very carefully, lacing her fingers together at the waist of her skirt.

Mac nods, looking up from the _New York Times_.

Maggie wrinkles her nose, clicking her teeth together before awkwardly proceeding forward with the conversation. “His sister Liz just called me. Apparently she tried to reach him all weekend but couldn’t, and she still had the extension to my desk, from when I was, well, his assistant, so—”

_Goddammit, Will._

“She called you,” Mac finishes for her, pushing back the sleeve of her blouse to look at her watch. _10:23 AM._ Will should be getting in soon. These days, he usually arrives at 10:50, and Mac doesn’t want to think about what’s causing the late nights that have been pushing back his arrival time the past few months.

“Yeah.” Maggie shifts uncomfortably, looking at a spot above Mac’s left shoulder. “I—do you know her? What do I do? I have her on hold.”

Mac sighs, and then pulls her glasses off her face. “Transfer the call in here, I’ll talk to her.”

 

* * *

 

Will winds up being fifteen minutes late for the rundown, hungover and looking like hell. She kicks him out and tells him to call his sister. Monday is also lunch with Nina, who shows up for the first time in the newsroom, willingly oblivious to the pointed stares. Mac is in the control room when she arrives, and Joey quietly clues her in before she leaves to go back to her office, so she idles by one of the panels until they’re gone off to wherever.

Tuesday Will awkwardly apologizes to her for putting her in a situation where she’d have to talk to Liz (who is very much not fond of her, not that Mac can blame her) and she accepts.

Wednesday, she sees Laura for her weekly appointment. Nina comes to the newsroom again at the end of the show to pick Will up. The staffers are more oblique this time. Mac refuses their invitations to get a drink with them, working in her office until 11:30 before heading down and finding Don the only one still at the bar.

Thursday, she wakes up to her cell phone ringing, and Molly yelling in her ear something about the ACN morning show while Don texts her the same. She’s out of bed, slipping her arms through the sleeves of a blouse by the time he hits the light stand.

 

* * *

 

Jim is in her office when she storms in at 9:15, and three other staff members follow her in within minutes, faces all varying degrees of gaping surprise.

“I don’t know,” MacKenzie says on a violent exhale, waving them back out the door. “Go do your jobs.”

Jim hesitates at the door.

“I honestly don’t know,” she tells him, voice milder, rifling through her desk for the medications she forgot to take before walking out the door.

And the thing is—

She wasn’t even _angry_ at first. It was so uncharacteristic that she was _afraid_ , at first, because she knows this has everything to do with his father. And just, ugh, _fuck_ because she knows Nina isn’t good for him, knows she been encouraging him to use the audience as a crutch, and she can’t fucking _stop it from happening_ , but _News Night_ is her fucking show and she owns his air time, and just _fuck._

Pointedly, she directs her thoughts away from the notion that if _she_ had been there for him, if not for Nina—

Jim nods.

“Where is he?” she asks, pressing the heels of her hands against her eyes. “I don’t care. I’ll yell at him if I see him right now, and his father on Friday—I’m going up to talk to Charlie, don’t tell him where I am.”

That’s a shitty thing to ask of Jim, but she’s had him do worse for her.

“Wilco.”

When she gets to Charlie’s office she’s greeted with a smile, and the news that Nina Howard is now among Will’s collection of ex-girlfriends. When she returns to her office forty-five minutes later, there’s a cup of coffee on her desk that she assumes is from Jim, until she drinks it.

Milk, three sugars.

The name on the cup is Dulcinea.

 

* * *

 

_I knew them all, individually. Molly of course was my assistant, and Danny was behind the camera in the studio when he wasn’t being farmed out to a field producer, and Jim was lurking in the corner of every control room, or so it seemed, when he wasn’t petitioning me to let him embed. I knew that Jim and Molly had gone to college together, marched in the marching band together, majored in journalism together, occasionally saw Jim perched on Molly’s desk outside my office before she would shove him off with a sharp rebuke, telling him to go back to work. I knew that Danny and Jim were friends, because I’d see them with their heads bent together walking out after a broadcast._

_I had no idea I’d be stumbling onto the cable news version of eating lunch in the band room by trying to seek solace during lunch in a darkened and empty editing bay. Then again, like most people in high school eating lunch in the band room, I was trying to avoid showcasing how few I was friends with (none) or being cornered by someone trying to get me to do something (produce their show), and so were they._

_“Sorry,” I stammered out, immediately backtracking on my assistant and the two junior staffers._

_Molly shot up, kicking out the chair she was resting her stockinged feet on. “No! Stay. If you want, I mean. We’re obviously not the cool kids’ table.”_

_“I’m not really sure that I’m a cool kid.” I realized the implication of what I said, shaking my head. “Not that it would be slumming it here, or something. So long as you don’t try to sell me on working for Wolf Blitzer, who is currently waiting at your desk for me to come back from my meeting.”_

_“Oh, so we’re waiting him out?” Molly asked, holding a clump of fries inches away from her mouth. “Or I could go scare him off.”_

_“I don’t think I’m contractually allowed to do that while you’re on your lunch break,” I replied, edging into the room and shutting the door behind me, clutching the sandwich I bought in the cafeteria. It seemed like months since I’d last had a normal conversation that wasn’t about my suddenly turbulent personal or professional life, and I was coming up on one._

_Jim snorted. “I’m pretty sure she’s contracted for indentured servitude.”_

_“If it was an indenture she’d be paying off a debt to CNN,” Danny, who was slumped into two chairs, face to the ceiling, quipped dryly._

_“CNN owes me,” Molly grumbled, gesturing for me to sit._

_“It owns me,” Jim groaned. And then, like he had been doing for weeks. “Mac, take me with you. You’re taking Danny.”_

_Danny, who had previously been embedded with UN peacekeepers in Africa, had been assigned to me as my videographer from the outset, and the CNN executives I had met with gave me the latitude to assemble the rest of the team on my own. And the more anchors like Wolf Blitzer and their high power producers spoke to me, begging me to stay (not that I resent them for it, I’d do the same thing to Molly two years later, as well as others, it’s just a part of the game), the more I wanted to go._

_Go, get out of America, get away from broadcast stations and the politics and throw myself into being an embed, the war. Try to forget, or at least try to change myself. Into what, I have no idea. Someone, I suppose, who would have been worthy of staying in Manhattan. At least I hope that’s who I am now._

_But I was so tired. Summer 2007 was blisteringly hot, muggy, and tiring, and I wanted out from the Atlanta humidity and my own emotional exhaustion. But first, I needed my team._

_Molly snorted. “She’s not even taking me with her, and I’m ABD on the subject. Why should she take you?”_

_“I have experience,” Jim protested._

_(I may have been desperate, but I still had some standards. Jim, if you read this, you know that I love you with all my heart and have never once regretted hiring you as a field producer or promoting you to senior producer for News Night._

_Still, honey…)_

_I sighed, remembering back to Jim’s resume as it was when he handed it to me. “You graduated from the University of Georgia in the bottom ten percent of the J-school, completed no internships except a last ditch attempt at the school paper, and have been bounced between field and desk producers since you came to work here three years ago. Why should I take you?” He seemed startled. I almost shrunk back; I hadn’t hardlined anyone like that in months, my own personal failures monumental when compared to anyone else’s. I had become timid, and used it as another reason to hate myself. I was confused, looking at the pieces of myself and not knowing which ones to keep and which ones to get rid of and as a result just lingered in self-loathing and abnegation. It was easier, in a way. I wouldn’t actually look at myself until years later._

_Until writing this, really._

_I shrugged, crossing my arms under my chest and sliding lower into the chair. “Honestly. Give me your best pitch.”_

_Molly perked up at that, abandoning her fries._

_“Wait, can I—?”_

_“Sure.” Molly was aggressive. I wasn’t sure on her self-confidence, but she faked it when it was necessary, which was good enough._

_Slowly, she placed her fries down on the computer desk in front of her. “Why?”_

_“I’m feeling magnanimous today.”_

_I was feeling more desperate than magnanimous, but in a way that felt like I was rapidly figuring something out._

_“She means that the cafeteria had chicken salad,” Molly said, quirking a little grin—Molly knew far more about me than I knew about her, and instead of feeling guilty, I decided to start trying to rectify that._

_“They did.” I smirked, despite myself. “And garden herb Sun Chips—”_

_“I did put some in your desk drawer,” she said, like a vague reminder._

_“—and you can come with me to Afghanistan.”_

_All three of them froze. Molly, before sitting straight up, feet flat on the floor, blue eyes forcing themselves wide. “Wait. Seriously?”_

_“Yes.”_

_And suddenly, I felt better than I had in half a year. Jim, of course…_

_“Wait, she doesn’t need to pitch—”_

_“Molly’s right,” I hedged, shrugging. It was a rattletrap kind of decision, appointing an assistant with little recent experience to an embed team, but if I was going to well and truly run away, I wanted people who deserved the experience going with me. “She’s ABD on post-Soviet Middle East relations, graduated summa cum laude in her undergrad, has worked abroad for MSNBC in Pakistan, and remembers what chips I like. She gets to go. You, on the other hand—What do you have to offer me?”_

_“Experience in the field,” Jim answered immediately, thoughtlessly._

_I scoffed. I’d looked over Jim’s portfolio a few times, besides what he’d already told me before. Jim was the sort of kid who did exceptionally well in high school, but peaked—academically, I mean—there. College was too big of a pond for him, and in my opinion, wasn’t practical enough. So instead my Jim did marching band, where he met Molly, and did things like study abroad in the Arctic where he’d be sent home for having a sexual encounter with an Eskimo. And then scramble senior year, putting together a slapdash resume and using his limited contacts to secure a position as an assistant to a CNN field producer after graduation._

_“Fluff pieces on the Midwest don’t really cut it for me.”_

_“I’ve been on the scene for three F5 tornadoes, and Hurricanes Katrina and Ivan, and the Platte Canyon High School hostage crisis,” he argued. Molly and Danny were both nodding along like they had heard this before._

_“Still domestic,” I chided. “Gimme your best shot, Harper. Whaddya got for me?”_

_On his face, I could see that he was changing direction._

_“Loyalty,” he said, very seriously. “Where you go, I will follow. No questions asked.”_

 

* * *

 

“No, we’re not telling that story,” Jim protests, squirming across the couch to try and get his hand over MacKenzie’s mouth, but Maggie, with a hand on his chest, pushes him back.

Mac laughs into her whiskey. “I thought you looked rather dashing in a flower crown. Jim’s a sucker for orphans.”

“You played soccer with them in the street!”

“Yes,” she nods seriously. “While the girls who didn’t want to play put flowers in your hair.” Sinking back into the cushions, she addresses the group still tucked into the back corner of Hang Chews, ignoring the look of chagrin on Jim’s face. “It was very sweet. Jim couldn’t speak Urdu at all, so Molly, another embed, and I let this group of little girls who had crushes on him show him around.”

She remembers their names, written into the margins of her notes on the effects of drone strikes in rural areas.

_Amira, Firdous, Izdihar._

Jim resigns himself to the story being told. “Mac is leaving out the part of the story where she tried to marry me off to the widow who ran the orphanage.”

“For the story, man! And she was so attracted to you, for reasons completely passing my understanding—besides, you should have studied Urdu more before we landed in Murree. Molly’s was so much better than yours.”

“Molly has a photographic memory!” Jim complains over Maggie’s cackle.

“Well, that’s your problem,” Mac demurs, finishing her drink. She briefly considers getting another and knows any of her boys would buy her a drink today (the broadcast was incredibly awkward for all of them, and while Will dumping Nina would otherwise, she thinks, be cause for celebration, but the morning show debacle has just made the whole day a mess of emotional avoidance) but decides against it.

She’s still angry, and doesn’t want to drink to the point where it’s amplified and sloppy. At least not in front of her subordinates. They deserve better than that.

That can come later, when she gets back to writing.

She’s pissed at Will, so it’ll be a “more” kind of night, hunched over her MacBook in bed with every TV on, fingers clacking away on the keyboard, drinking whatever the hell is in her pantry straight from the bottle.

“My Pashto—”

“Yeah, yeah,” she waves him off, debating the bottom of her tumbler before finally settling down onto the low table in front of the couch.

But Jim’s not done. “Mac is leaving out the part of the story where she cried when we had to leave them behind.”

“A little,” she concedes, crossing her arms under her chest.

She had been looking at the footage last night, after she got home late from the bar. It was the kind of night where she just wanted to look at cute pictures of little children, write about one of the few happy times she had in her time as an embed after the stabbing. She’d actually gone to sleep quite content, distracted from the moral and ethical qualms about Genoa, and Nina Howard—

The phone call at eight the next morning ruined that.

“You said you wanted to adopt _at least_ three of them,” Jim says, and Mac doesn’t miss the way Maggie’s expression falters in comparison to Tess and Kendra’s.

“I would make a fantastic mother,” she banters back nonchalantly. God, though, how fucked up was she at that point? A month away from the supply run, her nervous breakdown? Jim and Molly and Danny trailing after her like she might splinter apart at any moment, and they weren’t entirely wrong. But for a few days, they were living on the edge of a golden world. “I still have their drawings hanging on my refrigerator and everything and _do not give me that look_ , I know Danny showed you how to press flowers—”

“They were a gift!” Jim has to bat Tess’ hands away from his head where she’s twirling his mop of hair around a finger, swooning mockingly at the idea of Jim being kowtowed. “From orphans! Little orphan girls with braids and big eyes, who you wanted to adopt.”

Mac brings the story to a close for Maggie’s sake after that, the transition made easier when Sloan makes an appearance, complaining loudly about one of the new wardrobe consultants. Kendra and Tamara take sympathy on her, and they all grimace when Sloan lifts the hem of her blouse to show a pattern of pinpricks visible even in Hang Chew’s low light.

Mac lets them steer the conversation, watching them pull Sloan down into a seat, fight over the next round of drinks, squabbling like siblings.

Laura was right, she has a little family.

A few minutes later she’s dragged back into the conversation with Neal commenting on her shoes in relation to Sloan’s obsession with Gucci, and suddenly Gary is defending them because of his own situation with Nike and everything is about Neal’s cardigan problem until it circles back to making fun of Jim’s hair.

Sloan asks who’s up for another round and MacKenzie decides that’s her cue to duck out.

It’s been a day.

And while she likes these moments with her little news-family, her skin is starting to crawl as her buzz is beginning to fade, and she just wants to get home, to the quiet, scrub off her makeup and change into pajamas.

“Alright, I’m leaving you lot to get drunk.” She stands, brushing imaginary folds out of her skirt before reaching for her purse, fighting to keep her smile on her face, exhausted all of a sudden. “I expect you all to be over your hangovers by the first rundown.”

“I’m too much of a champ to get hangovers,” Gary comments, getting up out of his seat to help her into her coat.

“I know Gary,” she answers, smiling appreciatively and patting him on the chest. “But some amongst you are mere mortals, _Tamara._ ”

Smiling wider at Tamara’s _that was once!_ she waves goodbye to the group, and makes her way to the front of the building. Don, sitting at the bar, catches her arm. “Hey, you okay?”

“Me? I’m fine.”

Don looks like he doesn’t entirely believe her, but their relationship is based mostly upon a mutual understanding that happy endings just aren’t a part of their stories and the fact they they will continue to grin and bear it so he doesn’t push it.

“Will apologize?” he asks, tapping his pen lightly against his notepad.

“To the staff.”

And he did, earlier. Will’s not very good at apologies, but he got through it. And now she wants to go home, because she’s played her part for the staff who met her down here, expecting her to be happy, so she was happy, and now she wants to end the day and go home.

“Not to you?”

“I don’t want to talk to him yet.”

Don shifts on the barstool, taking a quick count of who’s nearby. “He was looking for you after the show. But you got out of there pretty quickly.”

That she did, whipping her headset off as soon as they were clear and Joey and Jim and Tess watched her sweep out of the control room, blowing past the doors before Will was out from behind the anchor desk. Purse, keys, jacket, and she was out of there before he could corner her in her office or in the hallway between the studio and the bullpen, hands in his pockets and eyes cast low.

She’s waited almost six years. He can wait a night. Let her be _angry_ for a night.

God, though, is she even angry? Whatever it is, it’s under her skin, coiling and releasing and she can smile through it, but she wants to scream, at something, anything.

She won’t.

She has the book for that now, and she thinks she is calmer, these days. A little more even-keeled, less anxious, now that she’s sorting through her thoughts, cataloguing them and realizing her time the Middle East has been dogging her more than she had assumed.

_You have post-traumatic stress disorder, you idiot. Of course it does._

But it’s always been easier to cling to what happened with Will. Always running, MacKenzie McHale. Setting her thoughts spinning instead of confronting what’s happened. Run away to punish herself for Will, to run away from Will, stand at attention for two years taking Will’s punishments as they’re meted out to run away from what happened in the middle east. Isn’t that why she took the job in the first place? If everything was alright with Will, then she’d be fine.

She’s not. And two years down the line, she can accept that.  

In the morning she’ll tell him it’s fine between them. Or what passes for fine, nowadays, the lies and carefully carved half-truths. Guarded smiles and hesitant interactions.

And that’s not on her.

If she’s learned anything the past week, _that’s not on her._ She fucked everything up, yeah. But he hasn’t fired her yet and being his EP comes with certain expectations if they’re going to do their jobs.

She’s going to forgive him, and it weighs her down inside. But what is six months with Nina Howard compared to what she did?

She gives Don an irreverent smile, scuffing her shoe on the floor. “Will can apologize to me tomorrow morning when I feel less like I’m going to hit him, and I’ll forgive him. I mean, what the _fuck_ was he thinking? ...don’t answer that.” Don gives her a short laugh, looking back down at his production notes. “Where is he?”

“Charlie was giving him a man to man talk,” he answers. “Sloan spoke to him earlier.”

“And?”

“Apparently about you,” he says with a shrug.

MacKenzie feels her eyebrows knit together. “And you know this—”

“Sloan and I talk,” he replies, palms held up in front of him. When she doesn’t respond, he looks up and rolls his eyes at the interrogative grin on her lips. “Don’t look at me like that,” he says, which only makes her roll her eyes again. “I mean, hey, he and Tabloid Barbie are over, right? That’s a big ‘fucking finally’ from everyone around here.”

She sighs, not happily. It’s relief, but the wrong kind. Will not being with Nina won’t mean anything. “So it would seem.”

They both half-turn out of habit when the door opens, Don lifting his eyebrows at her questioningly when Will passes through them for the first time in months. Mac bites her lip, trying to fight the immediate urge to run.

“I’m going to go,” she mumbles, watching until Will is close enough to their crowd, until she can hear Sloan’s _oh, she just left a few minutes ago._

“Yeah.” Don squeezes her arm looking up at her before shaking his head almost imperceptibly at someone across the bar.

Mac squeezes her eyes shut.

“Go, Mac. You look like you’re about to vibrate out of your skin.”

Locking her jaw, with widened eyes she casts Don one last look, and walks calmly out of Hang Chews and hails the first cab she sees.

Always running, MacKenzie McHale.

 

* * *

 

_I couldn’t stop hyperventilating. Something had broken inside of me and everything that I had coiled tightly for those three years was unspooling; I had pulled the pin on my own psyche. I lost track of how many times I lost consciousness. I faintly remember Jim and Molly getting me into the shower back on base, Jim propping me up while he washed blood out of my hair. I can’t remember what he was saying, but he was talking nonstop._

_It was my fault, and I say that objectively. I was the producer, I signed off on going to get the story. In the pursuit, the four of us were almost killed. Five marines were killed. I was resilient enough to handle failing myself. But I had been with Jim, Molly, and Danny for far longer than I had been with Will. And I signed off on what could have been their death warrants. I knew the supply trucks would probably be raided. I knew the area, I knew the route from Murree into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa._

_But the story was big._

_It also wound up being completely overblown._

_It was my fault, one hundred percent, and I unspooled._

She spends the rest of the night writing herself to the end of the story. Too anxious to sleep, she rushes her mind away from her doubt over leaving Will in the bar—he saw her, of course he saw her, and he knows she’s avoiding him—and into the past. Anxious already, she writes the ending to her cautionary tale for others.

_I knew that as soon as CNN caught up with us, I’d have to take the psychological evaluation I’d been avoiding since the stabbing, and I would fail. And our positions would be terminated, and I would be sent back to the United States. And by then, I had stacked up dozens of other things to be running from, besides Will—the explosion, Zack, sleepless nights in Baghdad, Jim getting shot, the night the roof caved in under the grenade, Chris losing his leg in the field, Molly’s face when she was grabbed in Islamabad, the stabbing. And then hiding under Cartwright’s body, taking his gun, and killing the Taliban fighters while Alvarez struggled to keep conscious. While we waited for backup._

_It all unspooled, finally and violently, thousands of sharp fractures spinning out until I felt like a pile of broken porcelain on the floor. I had to stop running._

_I don’t quite remember that night, which my psychiatrist says is to be expected from a mental break. I know, from what I’ve been told, that Jim sat and held my hand. I know that Molly got ahold of Noah. I know it was kept off the wires, but our point person in CNN Atlanta heard anyway._

_I don’t remember anything until Danny eased himself next to me in bed with the laptop hooked up to the satellite phone. He sat me up, made me drink a glass of room temperature water, washed my face with a cold cloth. I don’t know if he said anything. Probably not._

_It was 5 AM in Islamabad, 8 PM in New York City, and Danny had found a stream for News Night. I hadn’t watched since I was chained to my bed in Landstuhl, and before that it had been over a year. In Landstuhl, I was in the burnout of a morphine haze, and it took Molly twenty minutes to walk in from a cigarette break and change the channel before the beginning of the C block._

_We watched the entire show. I cried through it._

_But I stopped panicking._

In fact, MacKenzie’s pretty certain she called Will a fucking idiot at some point during the broadcast when he refused to push an interview as far as it could go and ask the right questions. And then she laughed, and couldn’t stop laughing, and Jim brought her a cup of coffee from the first pot of the day.

She slept, for a bit. And then woke up to a CNN attaché waiting for her.

She failed the psych evaluation, and that was the end of it.

Two weeks later she was being sent home.

_That was the beginning of March._

_I don’t know how the news of my diagnosis, or failed evaluation—“patient displays erratic behavior reminiscent of PTSD, it is recommended they are unfit to be embedded at this time”—got out, but it did, and I was unemployable. I visited my parents in London for two weeks, then flew to DC for my debrief at the Naval Yard, and on March 20th, got a phone call from Charlie Skinner, who had heard I’d been dumped by CNN._

_Since Charlie is a masterful sweet talker, I found myself booking a ticket to Evanston, Illinois, and purchasing a ticket to the Northwestern media panel for March 26. You all know what happened—it currently has 12 million hits on YouTube._

The signs, what he thought was a hallucination, and how she’d fled back to her hotel room after, willing her to phone to ring. But nothing, and she watched him do mediocre news for another week before he flew out to St. Lucia.

_And so Will became the anchor in broadcast news that no one wanted to EP for. And I was the EP in broadcast news that no news anchor wanted—including Will. So naturally, Charlie offered me the job behind Will’s back. He didn’t find out about it until his first morning back in New York. Which was, coincidentally, my first morning back in New York, and when I found out._

_I can remember my phone conversation with Charlie from the night before, pacing my DC hotel room staring, frightened beyond belief, at my packed luggage while he fed me a Don Quixote metaphor, about tilting at windmills instead of feeding the lowest common denominator. And when it became apparent I’d have to convince Will to let me to stay, I knew I didn’t have options. It was this, or my career was over._

_So I quoted “Man of la Mancha” at him and claimed it was Cervantes, so I’m inclined to say it wasn’t off to a very good start._

She writes what she can remember of her speech in his office that first day, when she was doped on a very high dose of anti-anxiety medication and antidepressants, manic and desperate.

_“Yeah. That did nothing for me.”_

_I didn’t recognize him. Which was fair, since I didn’t quite recognize myself anymore. Hell, I had fucking tattoos, scars from stabbings and shrapnel wounds. I was a stranger inside and out. At least he looked the same, sounded the same._

_Now, I suppose it’s become relevant to tell you the date of this conversation: April 20, 2010. The first day of the BP oil spill. Jim was one of the first reporters to hear from a source that Halliburton had no idea how to cap the well. Even then, it was a struggle to get Will to trust me enough to run the story._

_He did, eventually, and said the four most beautiful words someone like me can hear:_

_“Throw out the rundown.”_

_(He also said “Can you start two weeks early?” but you get my point.)_

_Which is the story of how I got the job the second time around. That first broadcast back was the first piece back into place. Rifling through the debris and finding one whole shard. I felt like I could breathe again—at least we could work together. Three years before, we couldn’t stand to be in the same studio together._

Silencing her BlackBerry again, MacKenzie kicks her legs out from her tangle of sheets and reaches for the bottle of Jameson on her nightstand, trying to remember how full it had been when she came home, before looking at her clock.

3:42 AM.

She decides to finish. She’s going to finish the fucking thing, and forgive Will in the morning.

_I lied to him, again._

_It was about Brian, the first time. “Yes, I’m single,” the first time. This time it was the ultimate f-word. Fine._

_“I’m fine.”_

_Charlie had tried to buy sympathy for me with him, and at the elevators Will asked me about it—_

_“Charlie said that you’re mentally and physically exhausted.”_

_I could have said yes, I was diagnosed with PTSD. Yes, I was stabbed, yes I watched men and women die, yes, I killed more than one myself. I held a twenty-two year old girl while a medic pulled shrapnel out of her leg. That kid you just called Scooter has saved my life more times than I wish, has seen me at lower lows than you ever have. Yes, I’m exhausted. Just let me do my job. You make me feel sane. You’re my last chance._

_I hugged my binder to my chest and stared at my shoes, willing myself not to cry. It had been so much easier, earlier, when he was determined to belittle me. I was already doing a pretty good job of that myself._

_But now, after broadcast, he was all warm smiles and easy posture, talking about old times like he didn’t hate me for what I’d done._

_What was I supposed to do?_

_I didn’t deserve his sympathy, or his kindness._

_“I’ve been exhausted since I was thirty,” I told him. “Everyone’s exhausted.”_

 

* * *

 

When it’s finished, her eyes red and burning, she wipes her nose with the back of her hand and stares down at the word document. 72,528 words. 290 pages, in five months. She wonders if that’s even healthy.

She emails it to Laura. And then to Molly and Noah. Jim and Danny, because it’s probably time.

Lastly, Maggie.

_I know we don’t talk about it, and I know you probably don’t want to talk about it, and I’m not going to make you. But here’s my story. You can put it back together again._

_—M._

Because she knows what it’s like to learn to be lonely, and she doesn’t want that for her.

 

* * *

 

MacKenzie doesn’t get in the next day until twenty minutes before the first rundown, which she knows Will is going to interpret as avoidance rather than having fallen asleep at 4:30 in the morning after chugging a bottle of water and taking two ibuprofen.

And after crying into her pillow for at least half an hour after slamming her laptop closed and then having to get up to find a dry pillowcase because leaving the wet one on felt like defeat, but that’s neither here nor there.

She finds Will sitting in the chair across from her desk, looking bedraggled, hair finger combed into a blonde mess.

“Are you okay?” she asks, setting her things down.

Jim stalks into her office before Will can respond, placing a cup of coffee on her desk and, with his back to Will, gives her a look that is an offering, plain and simple, to interfere. She stares at him until he leaves, an eyebrow lifted. _I’m fine_. Moments later he exhales through his nose and leaves, shutting the door behind him.

And so she knows he’s read her book. Or at least has started to.

“Sometimes I forget how well-trained you have him.”

Mac hums, watching Jim return to his cubicle. “He never needed training.” Folding her arms at her waist, she turns her attention back to Will. “You look terrible.”

“I didn’t sleep.” Scrubbing his hands over his face he leans back into the chair, and then looks at her. “Neither did you.”

Sighing, she tilts her head, debating at least half a dozen answers while considering the ceiling. “I don’t like not talking to you. I would have yelled, but your father died a week ago and I’m _pretty sure_ the two events are connected.”

She forces herself to lift her eyes, meet his, dropping them only once he gives her a nod of confirmation.

“Still, I shouldn’t have done it.”

“No.”

Another sigh, before she collapses into her desk chair, sliding the coffee cup towards her, snorting softly at the doodles he inked into the cardboard sleeve.

“I’m sorry,” he says weightily, because it’s for more than just the morning show. Because she bends, and he breaks.  

And like she knew she would, she caves to him.

“It’s alright.”

She doesn’t care if the loneliness kills her, or if she’s caught waiting for the rest of herself for something that never comes. She’s in the same place she was in a year ago; she doesn’t know if he’s going to come back.

But the truth is simple—

She doesn’t want to love anyone else.


	2. One Door Swinging Closed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **A/N:** I want to thank everyone who waited incredibly patiently for this part. It wound up almost double the length originally anticipated (as my stories are wont to do) and like I said in Part I... this is an emotionally taxing fic for me. I borrow a lot of my own experience with trauma and PTSD and writing this fic has forced me to confront a lot of my own emotional issues. 
> 
> That being said, many thanks to my Red Team for this chapter: [superspies-and-apple-pie](http://superspies-and-apple-pie.tumblr.com), [pipinthesuburbs](http://pipinthesuburbs.tumblr.com), [fragmentedvisions](http://fragmentedvisions.tumblr.com), [youaremybashert](http://youaremybashert.tumblr.com), and [ehc6j](http://ehc6j.tumblr.com). Couldn't have done this without your support. 
> 
> As a note, Part II is very much its own separate entity from Part I. It's set after "Election Night" in the timeline, so I'd recommend going back and reading _Sadder But Wiser Girl_ (and Part I, but that's up to you) before reading this. _A Good Lighter_ is another good idea, but not strictly necessary.

“And then Genoa happened?”

MacKenzie nods, placing a palm flat over her waist, counting out her inhales and exhales, praying for adrenaline to stop surging through her body. “And then Genoa happened.”

“How many panic attacks have you had since you woke up today?”

She almost had one when she woke up in bed with Will, before she opened her eyes, her mind snapping her back to some cruel hallucination she had when she was in Landstuhl recovering from being stabbed, doped out of her mind on morphine. At 7 AM with barely four hours of sleep, she had to scramble out his bed and into the bathroom she hadn’t been in since she found him unconscious on the floor over a year ago.

Her breaths had echoed on the tile floor, marble countertops cool under her palms while she leaned on his counter, staring herself down in the mirror, forcing herself to breathe through it.

And then she crawled back into bed with him, and kissed him awake, before murmuring that she was heading back to her apartment to shower and get changed and ready for work. He cinched his arms around her waist, sleepily plying her with reasons not to go, _I think the staff knows where you spent the night_ to _you need your sleep, stay and get another hour, I’ll make you breakfast_ , eventually offering to go with her. She kissed him again, sliding out of his grasp, and told him she’d see him in the newsroom.

“This is my second.” Fingers and forearms tingling and head beginning to spin, she slowly sits back down onto one of the chairs facing the door to Laura’s office.

She can’t quite bring herself to look at her psychiatrist, bracing her hands over her ribs where her lungs burn like she’s been running, should be running.

“I have Xanax samples in my desk—”

Mac shakes her head, exhaling through pursed lips. “I took it after I almost had another in the shower.”

“Do you know why you’re having them?” Laura asks, deliberately sitting motionless on the couch, legs crossed.

Mac swallows hard, cocking her head, forcing the corners of her lips into an uneasy grin. “Because I haven’t seen you in six weeks?”

“Flattery will usually get you everywhere, but not today.” Laura stands, careful not to sway towards Mac, before walking over to the corner her desk inhabits, and the filing cabinets that stand behind it. “But also yes.”

Mac fills her lungs up with air again, feeling her rib cage expand as far out and down as it will, before exhaling, trying to will away the weightless, muddled feeling in her head.  “Because a lawsuit is about to be filed anytime in the next fifteen minutes,” her eyes dart to the clock hanging over the door to make sure, “I’m not allowed to run away from it,” no, Will and Reese and Charlie have kept her from doing that, “everything is the ambush over again,” she knows Will thinks she’s spiraling back down to their break up, and that’s not accurate, “and I went from Will hating me to Will being my fiancé in approximately three minutes?”

She catches Laura tossing a long wave of dark brown hair over her shoulder. “Yeah, _I’m_ still reeling from that, so I’m imagining—”

“Shut up,” Mac says, stretching her shoulders back, irreverence sliding over her as falls clumsily from the high.

Laura snorts, hunched over her filing cabinet (“I like props,” she said once, when Mac asked her why she didn’t go paperless like the rest of the practice), leafing through her file. “ _What I mean is_ , it’s a big leap. Even if it’s a good one, there are new expectations, routines and rules and behaviors that are going to be renegotiated, on top of everything else you’re staring down at the moment. And you know now you can’t just assume things will fall into place with Will, you’re too smart for that.”

She does know that. She just expected she’d be the one bending over backwards, the one listening to demands and provisos. Blinking, eyes not really focused on anything in particular, she breathes through her mouth until her lips are dry. She’s not certain how it would have worked; she would have just kept lying to him, if he’d come to her like that.

Instead, she and Will are on even ground. That’s what the ring is, as large and alien as it feels on her finger.

(She almost laughs, has been almost laughing since she woke up, at the fucking absurdity of it all—it’s so fucking large and ostentatious, but he bought it to make a point, and because he could. It’s five karats, at least, because being Mrs. McAvoy isn’t a goddamn joke. She remembers what she said to Laura awhile back about how she hadn’t really been a celebrity girlfriend, and then how she’d snuck out of Will’s building this morning with her hands jammed in her coat pockets.)

Then again, even ground is fairly alien in and of itself.

(Shit, she has to tell her parents, too.)

“I haven’t had an honest relationship with Will in years,” she manages to get out, eventually. If she learned anything from last night, that was it.

It’s not a lack of faith, or confidence in them. It’s just _so much_ , and all at once. And Will’s so happy (she thinks being a prosecutor in another has numbed him to legal battles in a way she’ll never accomplish), and she doesn’t want to make him unhappy, or make him think she’s having second thoughts, or—

“We started to,” she sighs, while Laura minds something at her desk. “The night we were stuck in the office for Sandy—and last night, we were both honest with each other.”

She walked into Laura’s office this morning with no preface other than “Will and I are engaged,” spinning the ring around her finger while she sped through a brief explanation of everything that’s unraveled since the Genoa retraction, the legal woes and the media mockery and criticism, Jerry’s lawsuit and things Laura knew about anyway.

And how sleeping on top of Will while trying to not burst out of her skin during Hurricane Sandy seems a world away, and how it hadn’t made sense, but she’s never put herself into a situation where she’d be triggered by booms and flashbangs, only ever used to the sustained anxiety that she’s used as a crutch as much as its hobbled her, as well. How she’d woken up alone, the sleeping bag tucked in around her, the bullpen alive again and the power back on. And then how two days later he waited outside for her, at her deposition.

How he’s been slowly becoming her partner again, or something, since Nina. How he told her _someone would have to be torturing you._ How he sat next to her while the entire thing unraveled when there were empty seats farther away.

How they had tried to resign, her exit strategy, how she was going to run away. Maybe teach. Maybe do more writing. Maybe just _run_. How she expected this morning she’d be heading in early to pack up her office.

Laura sits back down across from her while she tries to piece together what say.

“I got him to fire me and then stopped stalling on a conversation I tried to have with him while I was embedded, a conversation we should have had six years ago, because I figured I was going to walk out of his life for good this time, so no consequences, and then the ring—”

Elation, and then the low again this morning, even if his arms were warm and his breathing steady and he smelled like he always has, like laundry detergent and cotton and soap.

“It’s a lot.”

His fingers splayed at her waist, and his hands were big and warm and she can’t stand to sleep alone, not after him and then three years of bunking with at least three others. But she’s always had a night light, so maybe she just wasn’t the right person to send into a warzone.

“And I have a lot—” Laughing miserably, she hides her face in her hands, before groaning. “‘Yes, honey, I swear I’m _ecstatic_ , but I’m going to have my fifth, or something, panic attack of the day and I snuck out of bed this morning to go see my therapist, please don’t take it personally that I’ve lied to you for three years about—’”

Laura finally cuts her off there. “You said he never asked.”

‘He didn’t _know_ ,” Mac says emphatically. “I didn’t _want him_ to know. Guilt.”

And telling Will would be letting go a lot of that guilt, letting go of building her image of herself on a bedrock of guilt and regret. Because they’ve been undone and have crumbled under her feet, and she has to find her footing again. And she has to let him in to do it.

And imagine, last night she’d been asking him when the fuck he was going to forgive her.

Well—

Last night she was the mental equivalent of a train running off the tracks, and even if she knows the reason—rationally, she understands this—the reason she’s so fucked up over Genoa—even though she does firmly believe it’s her, because she spent _eight fucking months_ deciding whether or not to run the story—is because she almost got herself, Molly, Danny, and Jim killed on the USMC supply run from Murree to Lakki Marwat, and she was looking for Will to—do anything. Say anything.

Fire her. Tell her he’d never love her again. Concede that Genoa was all her fault, that everything is her fault and she’s trash, that she never should have crawled out of the hole she hid in after her nervous breakdown in 2010, that he wished he’d never met her in the first place. Something to give her guilt and regret to chew on until it consumed her.

Or the incredibly small chance that he’d forgive her for everything, repeat back all the things she’d manage to convince herself of in the spring, before he broke up with Nina.

A five karat ring is not small.

_I kept the ring because I’m in love with you._

“You _emailed him_ ,” Laura continues. “And if he’s not a dumbass, he won’t take it personally. The man has severe depression, anxiety, and probably PTSD himself, considering the sustained trauma that was his childhood, or so far as you’ve explained.” Looking down at her notes, she licks her lips and pushes her glasses back up her nose. “What did he promise you last night?”

“To never hurt me again. That he would never stop loving me.”

“So _hold him to it._ He’ll want to help you. And if he won’t punish you, you shouldn’t punish you either. Or the both of you, by keeping secrets.”

Huffing, she makes a vague noise of distress. “There are _things_ on my body that he hasn’t even seen.”

“Are you insecure about them?”

He’d been off to find her a spare toothbrush when she stripped out of her clothes, pulling one his long sleeve tee shirts over her head before filching a pair of boxers that she had to roll up twice to get to stay at her hips, big enough to cover the tarot card on her hip, the top of her thigh, really.

Hesitant to let his hands under her clothes at all, he only pulled her hair away from the nape of her neck and wrapped her arms around her waist from behind, keeping her upright while she brushed her teeth with her eyes drooping.

They’ve already discussed it; he knows about the scars. She thinks he’s waiting for her to show him, doesn’t want to stumble on anything else before she’s ready.

“No. I just.” MacKenzie opens and closes her mouth several times before chewing on her bottom lip, imagining Will’s fingers tracing the eight inch scar on her abdomen, the lyrics in courier font on her ribs, the shrapnel wound on her calf, asking her where and why and how.

“They’re things that have stories.”

She has the words. Writing her book taught her that. She just feels so _unsteady_. It’s not that she doesn’t want that, it’s just the prospect of all that emotion is overwhelming.

“I used to swear I’d never get a tattoo because I couldn’t commit to having the same job for three years, let alone something on my body for the rest of my life. Now I have four. What am I—‘well, dear, I was manic and reckless and clinging to anyone who liked me, and this girl you don’t know thought it would be a good idea, so,’ and then the _scars_ —”

“Mac, you can go slowly,” Laura interrupts. Her voice isn’t entirely forceful, but edges along bluntness. She pauses, jotting something down on her legal pad. “I’m assuming you haven’t had sex yet.”

“No.” That’s overwhelming, too, is too much like performance at the moment, when she’s having trouble keeping her breathing even and looking her therapist wholly in the face. “I was exhausted, he just gave me something to sleep in and I passed out.”

Will had offered that they go back to her place, and she had shook her head and leaned into him when they were finally able to leave at 2:30 in the morning, thirty minutes after the end of broadcast. She needed to be able to escape for her therapy appointment without having to wake him up and explain that—

_I have PTSD and I see a psychiatrist and those little orange bottles stacked along my bathroom counter are a thing, I know you know about the Xanax but not the Wellbutrin or Cyclobenzaprine, and yes, I have two different doses of Xanax depending on the day. And then my heart medication, the beta blockers—_

So they went back to his place, and MacKenzie fell asleep on his shoulder on the drive over.

 _Slow,_ Mac thinks, swallowing down the acrid taste of frayed nerves in her mouth. _Slow is good._

“That’s probably not a bad thing.”

“Yeah.” Feeling her heart rate beginning to climb again, she forces herself to slow down, to trace the hem of her skirt with her fingers. “How do I tell Will I want to go slow?”

“Will put you right to bed last night, didn’t he? Mac, and I don’t mean this in a… deprecating way, but you’re pretty clearly struggling to keep your head above water. Last night you had endorphins and adrenaline for a bit but right now you’re back to trying to function on four hours of sleep in the wake of a huge crash and a major emotional upheaval.”

She laughs at that. “Are you telling me I look like crap?”

“You look exhausted. Mentally and physically.”

“You know, I’ve heard that from you before.” Mac sighs, looking up at the ceiling and trying very desperately to not remember where she was three years ago.

“Yeah.”

“Last night, before broadcast, he said he was worried about me.” And she had pushed him, trying to get him to snap at her like he used to, like he did before Nina and before his father died and he went on the morning show, before he apologized. Whether Will realizes it or not, he hasn’t punished her for anything over a year, until she goaded him into it last night. “He’s been worried about me since—well, openly, since the hurricane.” Since he found her in her office, shaking in the dark. “I told him a few things, about my time embedded. Not a lot.”

“He’s a smart man. If you tell him what you need, he can figure it out.” Laura snorts, giving her what Mac thinks is an encouraging smile. Which, considering what Laura’s heard about Will in the past three years… “It’s kind of his job now.”

Mac frowns. “I don’t want him to have to take care of me.”

“MacKenzie,” Laura says, the her mouth straightening into a line. “I’m pretty sure you sat by his bedside for forty-eight hours a year ago and got him through a broadcast where he found out his father died during one of the commercial breaks.”

She breathes again ( _one, two, three, four, five—one, two—one, two, three, four, five_ ) tapping her fingers restlessly on top of her kneecaps. “I need to stop feeling guilty.”

“Yes.”

“Will and I have terrible timing.”

“Yes.”

“I swear, when the tabloids catch wind of this, and it’s a bloody wonder they haven’t already…” But MacKenzie supposes they’re all busy at the courthouse this morning. Eyes returning to the clock, she sees it’s far past 9:30. The suit’s probably already been filed. They might have already been served. She sighs, trying to quell the thousands of thousands of words, hundreds of stories, in her head. “Honesty?”

“It does wonders.” she replies. “And you deserve it. Both of you.”

“I… have to go to work.”

Laura nods, standing again. “And I’m upping your dosage of Xanax and writing you a script for Aripiprazole. You did well on it a few years ago. Where do you want me to send it?”

_Of course._

Wearily, Mac stands as well, dipping to pick her purse up off the floor. “The CVS on 5th, I’ll pick it up on my way to work.”

 

* * *

 

_Islamabad doesn’t have a marine base, but approximately a thousand marines stationed throughout the city who work out of the Defense Attaché Office in the US Embassy. We arrived in the aftermath of a suicide bomber who killed five people outside a UN outpost, and our first briefing with US officials warned us about the increased Al Qaeda presence in the city, to cover Molly’s bright red hair, and to let me speak because I wasn’t obviously American._

_It felt like a city under occupation._

_I grew up partially in West Berlin in the 80s. I was born in America to a British diplomat; we got shuffled around a lot, from New York to DC to Athens, during the Aegean Crisis, and later to Ankara and Istanbul, and then to West Berlin, which involved frequent trips to Moscow. But the point is—I spent four years living in an embassy that was blocks from the Berlin Wall, and accompanied my father into East Berlin more than a few times._

_Steps taken by the United States to vastly expand its aid to Pakistan, as well as the footprint of its embassy and private security contractors there, were aggravating an already volatile anti-American mood as Washington pushed for greater action by the government against the Taliban in the western regions. The newest aid package to Pakistan had terms that made Pakistani officials uncomfortable about the security of their sovereignty, and the expanding American security presence had become a particularly violent and lawless boys club. DynCorp attracted immense scrutiny after the Pakistani news media reported that Blackwater, the contractor that generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, was also in Pakistan._

_By the time we arrived, and were first driven from the airport to the embassy by armored car, there had been a series of complaints by Islamabad residents who said they had been “roughed up” by hefty, plainclothes American men bearing weapons, presumably from DynCorp. We would spend months walking out among civilians watching it happen, too, and as the rioting escalated in the fall of that year, so did the brutality._

_But in June 2009, when we first put our boots on the ground to sleep in actual beds in an actual hotel for the first time since we were in Germany for three weeks at Christmas the year before, we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. Danger, yes, but Islamabad is a modern city with modern conveniences._

_It was something I thought I knew—a politically volatile city with a large diplomatic and covert military presence._

_The US embassy had received complaints about DynCorp, and confirmed two instances of brutality, but openly the embassy denied receiving any formal protests from the Foreign Office. It also declined, several times during our seven month stay in Islamabad, to comment about the presence of Blackwater. The company had been rebranded as Xe Services when it was relocated to Pakistan and so far as they were concerned, it didn’t exist in any of its former iterations. Or apparently, its current one._

_We personally learned otherwise our first weekend there, trying to establish contacts with locals using local Embassy employees…_

 

* * *

 

Walking into the newsroom half an hour after the suit was filed is something Mac thinks she should be prepared to handle. Getting shot at? Check. Nearly getting blown up? Check. Looking at the faces of distraught staffers? Been there, done that. Handling various lying and politicking government officials? Check, and in several languages. Getting roughed up and shaken down by armed guards? No problem.

Maggie, still in the same clothes from last night, comes up to her as soon as she walks in.

“These are from legal,” she says apologetically, handing over a stack of messages. “We were served about twenty minutes ago. Rebecca said she’ll be sending down a brief sometime around noon.”

“Did you sleep?”

Maggie shrugs, widening her exhaustion-bruised eyes. “A little, on the floor of Sloan’s office. I was too excited. Anxious. Whatever.” Mac pushes through the door to her office, and Maggie follows. “Did you? You look less—”

“Like a body that was dredged out of the Hudson?” she muses, dropping her bag down behind her desk, sitting in her chair and starting up her computer.

Maggie twists the piece of paper in her hand into a rope. “I was going to say—well, yes, a little bit.” Biting her lip, she awkwardly shifts her weight forward. “Where’s Will?”

“I had to run out this morning to my apartment, so I’d imagine he’s either on his way here or will be soon.” Bending over, she fishes her BlackBerry out of her purse. No text messages. “If not, I’ll kick his ass. And has anyone gotten ahold of the thing yet?” she asks, gesturing with her left hand. “Not that I’m complaining, but the last time I disseminated information to the staff it wound up being sent to 150,000 people—”

“All the weekly tabloids went to print last night, so none of them have it. And the bloggers I think are covering the election still, as well,” she says, folding her arms behind her back. “We put an intern on it.”

“Okay.” Sighing, she folds her arms in front of her and looks up at Maggie, who looks as good as _she_ did yesterday, greasy hair and dry eyes included. “Go find a hole to sleep in until the rundown.”

Maggie nods gratefully before rushing out, Jim slipping past her as she exits. He too looks like he’s had very little sleep, but he manages to find a smile for her when he drops a coffee and bagel on her desk. “How you doing?”

“Fantastic,” she answers, absently spinning her engagement ring around her finger, wondering if she’s going to be distracted by the weight of it all day.

Jim hums. “And your lip is bleeding because—”

Glaring, she lifts one of her hands to her mouth, an index finger coming away with a smudge of red where she must have bitten through the skin. “I’m _happy._ ”

He holds up his hands in front of him, palms outward. “Mac, all I’m saying is I know last night, you were freaking out about your Wikipedia page— _which is fixed, by the way_ —and picking a fight with anyone you could, especially Will, trying to get yourself fired.”

MacKenzie raises a brief attempt to stare him down, before sighing and extracting her reading glasses from the top drawer of her desk and rapidly trying to change the subject, not particularly keen on repeating this conversation again today. At least not more than one more time, since she knows she’s going to have to go through it with Will. “Neal fixed it?”

“I got Hallie to publish an article with—that’s not the point.” Preoccupied, Jim thumbs the manila folder in his hand. “I’m checking in. And warning you that I accidentally told Molly. About the thing. The getting married thing.”

 _Oh god._ She almost laughs.

“Accidentally?” she asks dryly, lifting both of her eyebrows at him while typing in Wikipedia’s web address into her browser.

He laughs nervously before quirking his lips into a sheepish grin. Fingers coming to rest against the knot of his tie, he continues with his eyes focused on a spot on her blotter. “I may have told Molly after a couple of shots of tequila that we did at 4AM with whoever was left in the newsroom.”

She gapes at him.

“Jim!”

“We were celebrating your engagement,” he protests. Rolling her eyes, MacKenzie goes back to scanning the Wikipedia article. “I was kinda worried for a little bit she’d get on a train and come up here today but apparently she has an interview with a three-star General, so—”

“We are spared the onslaught?”

“She faxed in your engagement _present_ though,” Jim says, brandishing the folder in his hand and dropping it onto her desk. Wary of his excitement, she opens the cover. “Petraeus, signed, sealed, and delivered. Well, her and Danny. Apparently they’ve had it for a few days.”

Molly’s handwritten notes, Danny’s contacts in the DoD and Congress. Numbers and contact information for people willing to go on the record, a list for those willing to go on the air, and two different copies—one with black marker retracting the address lines and one not, each dated with the day they were obtained—of emails that, once she finishes reading them, make Mac desperately wish that she hadn’t.  

“And? Their contracts expired with Romney’s concession.” She keeps flipping through the papers in the folder, wondering why Molly and Danny were sitting on a story like _this_ when they were about to get out of their jobs, biting her lip to tamp down on the emotion welling up.

“I think Molly initially wanted to leverage a position on the _Time’s_ editorial staff with it.” Mac bites her lip harder, nodding. That would do it. _They shouldn’t have._ “Seriously though, you okay? You have the face.”

She looks up at Jim, eyebrows knitting together. “What ‘face?’”

Jim squirms, kicking at the carpet. “The anxious, fidgety, gonna-start-firing-people-at-random or like, walk into a riot, face.”

The noise she makes in response is strangled, and distinctly frustrated. She feels like she’s screaming into the crowd, over and over again, hearing only her voice echo between her ears while everyone chatters on, clueless. It’s an echo that’s followed her from years, from war zones into cities and back home, from the mornings to the evenings, at work and at home and with friends, rarely quieting.

And now, amplified.

“Rebecca is sending down the preliminary brief in two hours, and I’m fairly certain I’m the weakest link. Jerry’s lawyers only sent us some of the complaints, and we know they go back more than 18 months. They have to.”

And if they just let her _leave_ , she could _fix it._ Fix _her_ mistake. Just like how when she had to leave CNN she helped Molly get into Princeton’s PhD program and called for Danny’s job at CNN, pulling strings, and secured a promotion for Jim at CNN, even though he quit his job, followed her here anyway.

It’s not about her and Will, no matter what she told him last night. Running away from Will put absolutely nothing to rights. Coming back and staying, waiting it out, did. There was no quick fix for her and Will.

There _is_ no quick fix for her and Will, she thinks, remembering her conversation with Laura from a few hours ago.

Her stomach plummets.

“Mac.”

Licking her bottom lip over where it’s beginning to bleed again, she blunts her voice to something softer. “I was the one who fired him without consulting anyone else, regardless. They _have_ to target me, because I’m the one doing the alleged scapegoating.” They both already know that. Pulling her glasses off her face, she drops them on top of the folder. “I’m just saying, if I had it my way, I’d be packing up my office right now and no one would be worrying about this mess.”

Cocking his head, he folds his arms under his chest. “Yeah, and we’d all be packing up our desks with you, Mac.”

“Jim, no.”

The little laugh he gives her is almost bitter, and the taste of blood is metallic on her tongue. “I walked through literal gunfire for you, Mac. Through riots and really sketchy caves and armed guards and shit—you go, I follow. It’s how it works.”

“And yet, you almost quit at the prospect of working for my ex,” she says, voice droll, trying to lacquer nonchalance over the near panic she know he’s close to reading on her face.

For a moment, Jim stutters, jaw working. “I turned it around!” He jabs his finger at her. “In like… thirty seconds!”

After she guilted him into staying, yes.

“I know,” she says, softer. “I just think it’s funny.”

Hands back on his hips, he looks at the ground, curling his rounded shoulders forward, and is silent for a long moment. “You’re not okay. But that’s okay. We’re all here for you, you know.”

She has to breathe, eyes focused on the rapidly blurring words written in Molly’s polished script.

_So he took a knee? Jim’s version of events is quite jumbled and I’m fairly certain he doesn’t know what happened either way. PS: still gonna threaten to kick McAdouche’s McAss. Fucking finally. —M._

Eventually, she feels like she can look up, finding Jim watching her expectantly.

“I know.”

In a lot of ways, she wishes they weren’t.

But she’s not running anymore. She made that decision months ago.

“See you at the rundown. I want this in the A block.”

 

* * *

 

_Going from the Green Zone and Peshawar to Islamabad was jarring. Sleeping in a safe hotel room was jarring. I would lay awake like I had for the past year, scared more now that I knew I was safe. It didn’t make sense, but I had settled into a kind of anxiety that couldn’t be rationalized or logicked away. I still have a problem with that, even now as I’m writing this from my apartment that’s a block from Times Square, with fluorescent lights that stream through my bedroom window twenty-four hours a day, and a night light. But like I said, there are some things that you just never quite escape._

_We were embedded with the Marine Security Guard Detachment Islamabad, or in military shorthand, the MSG DET Islamabad, who were far from the boys of the 7th Marines. Not in a bad way, just that they were fewer, tenser, warier of outsiders and more subject to politics. The slight mania of Noah, on his third tour, and his band of rag-tag boys and miscreants was something I had adapted to. In Islamabad, I was alone. Back to stiff meetings and routine patrols where hardly anyone would talk, spending my nights alone, filing reports instead of thinking too hard._

_For what it was worth, there were more stories to chase._

_That, of course, meant that we had the tendency to get into more trouble._

_I generally let Molly handle talking to the citizens of Islamabad, civilian and soldier alike. Her Urdu was nearly flawless, and at twenty-three she was harmless enough that she could get us invited in for tea._

_But she wasn’t harmless enough for the Blackwater guards._

_At the end of our first month there, I suppose she had gained enough notoriety—because of her looks, her age and gender, and probably who she was talking to. Molly, like the rest of us, had heard of the ignored complaints made before we arrived. She had expressed interest in tracking them down, and I agreed, so long as Danny and one of our Pakistani contacts went along with her._

_Jim and I were supposed to meet them in an open air market at lunch, before afternoon prayers, but our meeting in the US Embassy went late, so we left them a message saying we’d meet them back at the hotel._

_At half-past noon, after twenty minutes of not picking up the phone, Molly half-carried Danny into our room, clutching a torn notebook under her arm, the camera between them._

_“I think we have a story,” Danny gasped, before collapsing down onto the bed, mouth full of blood._

 

* * *

 

Since Genoa aired Noah hasn’t been allowed to contact her directly, instead passing his messages through Molly, who has been steadfastly editing the book since March. Well, they both have. It’s a way to work with Molly, so MacKenzie does it, even if since March she hasn’t been intending on publishing the document as a memoir or whatever, or at all.

(Well, that’s not entirely true. After the retraction it began to form as a reality in her mind again.)

Molly’s been in and out of the country since 2010, working on her dissertation. The credits for the PhD she’d had since before they embedded, from Emory, where she had to discontinue her research and get a job related to her undergraduate degree—journalism—to pay her bills. And then after coming home with three years of embed hazard pay without having to worry about rent or utilities, could afford to finish her doctorate at Princeton. After which _Dr. Thompson_ abandoned broadcast news to work in print media.

(Even though Mac keeps telling her to start riding the cable news circuit as a guest, someone will hire her eventually as a contributor, and then a correspondent, and really, Molly has the acuity and gravitas to be an anchor, if she wanted it.)

So this became her thing, to have with Molly.

The book, and the footage, and the pictures, and late night drinking so much moscato that they fall asleep like they used to, slumped over against each other on the couch.

And it was good, for months. She was _good_.

At her job, at her relationships, at going to therapy and moving forward, putting her time as an embed and her guilt complex over Will behind her. She was trying to help Maggie. Laura was weaning her off of the mood stabilizers and she and Will were, not that it matters, because she and Will _are_ , but still—

_And then Genoa happened._

She pauses in reading Molly’s latest edits to her… well, it’s no longer her exit strategy, as of ten hours ago, she doesn’t really know what the hell it is, when Will sweeps into her office shortly after 10:30.

“Sorry,” he says, leaning over her desk to drop a kiss on top of her head. “Charlie grabbed me as I was coming in. Your hair smells nice.”

“Hi,” she murmurs when he straightens, and for half a moment she forgets everything entirely at the way his eyes light up when she looks up at him over her glasses.

There’s a moment that should be filled with a kiss, and she can tell he’s tempted. Laughing, she stands when he sways into her. “Not in the office, you know the rules,” she giggles, pressing her index finger into chest, laughing harder when he pouts. “I’ll see you in half an hour. Let me do my work.”

He manages to steal a kiss (her cheek, this time) before heading to his own office, and she remembers everything again.

Closing the document, she sits back down in her desk and starts running through the pitches the staff have been making to her off and on all morning.

It’s going to be a long day.

 

* * *

 

The Petraeus story is enough to lift the worry sagging the staff’s shoulders. The staffers not aware of the trade they almost made the night before are excited, despite their dry red eyes and distinctly alcohol-harassed expressions.

(At least they look like they’re having good days, and she refrains from telling Tess and Tamara to stop giggling over the emails and share them with the rest of the class.)

Will looks more than vaguely disgusted while reading the more salacious email, holding the edges to the table with his fingertips, looking like he’d rather not be touching it at all. “Where did you get this from?”

Her eyes flicker to Jim, who smiles tightly at her in attempt to tamp down his eagerness, earning himself a glare that she hopes roughly equivocates to _shut it, you._ “Molly Thompson. She’s an International Relations PhD, and writes a nationally syndicated column, most recently was involved with the _New York Times_ coverage of the election. Put out a book a year and a half ago—”

“ _Across the Startled Sky: Life, Death, and…_ whatever, in Baghdad?” Will asks, and Jim looks like he’s enjoying himself a little too much, and Mac hits him on the shoulder with the back of her hand. “It won a… Pulitzer? You know her?”

“She’s a friend,” she answers, trying to keep her tone casual.

“She’s maid of honor,”Jim corrects. “She embedded with us,” he continues, when Will looks at the both of them, confused. Mac hits him again, and Jim looks up at her, before swatting her hand away. “And you know she is, she’ll murder you if she’s not.”

“How do you know that?”

“When I spoke to her last night, she said, and I quote, ‘after six years, if I’m not maid of honor, I’m going to murder her.’ So that seems, you know, pretty solid.”

Looking up at the ceiling, she sighs. It’s far too early to be worrying about bridal parties.

“Anyway,” she starts again, rerouting the conversation. “It’s from her, it’s credible. Jim and Maggie and Tess checked everything out.”

“Why isn’t she running it herself?” Will asks.

“It’s a gift,” she says carefully, feeling her lips turn into the shape of a smile without her permission when Will pieces together that it’s a gift for their engagement. “When she got engaged I gave her a story, which eventually evolved into her dissertation,” she continues, gesturing vaguely with one hand while spreading out her copy of the sources out onto the conference room table for the staff to look at. “You’ll meet her... eventually.”

“She’s terrifying,” Jim informs Will cheerily, and Mac can see Jim replaying years’ worth of Will McAvoy tirades and jokes in his mind.

_Molly was a fierce and formidable gateway. In Atlanta, I was a commodity. I don’t exactly know what the take was on my sudden departure from ACN, but I found myself headhunted from in and outside CNN in the four months during which we were preparing to embed. She had a talent for turning people around with a smile and walking them back out the door before they realized they had been screwed over. Or more than once, her sweet smile would transform into a sharkish grin, and her entire posture would change from harmless and unassuming to predatory, and she would send whoever running trying to hold together the shredded pieces of their dignity._

_And I was a bit of wreck, I’ll make no secret of that. I thought I had it together, and I think to most people it appeared that I did, but when someone is shadowing you for twelve to fourteen hours a day, I suppose they’d be an idiot not to notice. Molly became protective. I don’t know what I did to deserve her loyalty, but all I could do was try to repay the favor._

_I knew she had been working on a PhD at Emory in post-Cold War Middle East policy before having to drop out of her program due to financial constraints, and being embedded would be a huge opportunity for her._

_Molly is, and I mean this in the most sincere way, the biggest miracle._

_Found in a dumpster outside an apartment complex when she was weeks old, she bounced from foster home to foster home as a kid. When she was nine, a woman stepped forward as her biological mother, keeping her from being adopted but as someone with a drug problem, couldn’t take her either, instead jerking Molly around for years before finally disappearing again. Finally washing out of the system at sixteen when she graduated high school, Molly went on to earn a degree in journalism from the University of Georgia in three years, during which she lived with former foster parents who had retired and moved south._

_Molly has very few people, and I am privileged to be one of them._

Mac snorts, catching her fiancé’s eye, before dropping her gaze back to the comment Molly was able to wrangle from a Congressman on the Committee for Defense Spending, muttering, “Yeah, a little bit.”

 

* * *

 

Whatever amount of good cheer she’s built up during the rundown meeting is scattered and lost when legal sends down their preliminary analysis of the complaint.

Holding the stapled sheets of paper containing the salient excerpts from the complaint in her shaking hands, a nervous, roiling laugh escapes her lips.

It’s her.

It was always going to be her.

_...institutional failure under the direct mismanagement of News Night’s Executive Producer, MacKenzie McHale, who has created a workplace environment that is sloppy, disorganized, unprofessional, prone to favoritism and outright hysterics, encouraging her staff to go to any lengths to secure a story, and along with William McAvoy, co-defendant, would become unreasonably upset and prone to violent displays of emotion when a story could not be secured for the show._

_We have grounds to believe that Ms. McHale’s termination from CNN in 2010 was the result of her professional incompetence that resulted in another institutional failure such as the Operation Genoa story, and that she was only hired to the position of Executive Producer due to her status as William McAvoy’s ex-girlfriend, contributing to the unprofessional, and at times, hostile work environment which…_

She hears something hard and heavy hit the wall that she shares with Will’s office, and she’s still laughing when he appears in her doorway little more than a minute later.

 

* * *

 

She makes it through.

She always does, smiling tightly and nodding encouragingly at her staff. If nothing else, she’s going to be a good boss. Make up for the past week.

Makes sure to be nice to Neal, especially.

 

* * *

 

On the verge of panic all day, encased in a whirlwind of rundown meetings and breaking news and at least twelve different people coming up to her, telling her it’s not her fault, that it’s bullshit, and all she could really do was nod and smile tiredly, if not gratefully, if not feeling it all.

It doesn’t process that Will’s come home with her until she’s standing in the middle of her living room, shoes off, and he’s asking her if she’s hungry or if she wants to go to sleep.

“Sleep,” she mumbles, rubbing her forehead. “Are you staying?”

“If you want me to,” he says, taking her purse out of her hand, fishing her BlackBerry and as an afterthought, the bottle of Xanax that’s been in there all day, and hands them to her.

“I do,” she whispers, looking down at the bottle in her hand. She just wants him to hold her like the night they spent together huddled in her office during Hurricane Sandy.

He takes her hand and starts pulling her towards her bedroom, startling when she nearly trips over her own feet. And then he catches her against his chest, and she thinks she must make some strangled noise of distress, trying very desperately to fight the sudden flood of tears as the day slowly begins to unravel. Will seems to know what to do, though, pressing his lips to her forehead while working her out of her jacket, tugging at the tie at the side of her wrap dress until the halves part.

“I—”

Shushing her quietly, he turns her towards her bedroom. “Go shower. I have to make a phone call.”

Her forehead drops to his shoulder, and she turns her head to kiss the skin above his collar before pulling herself away from him and heading into her bedroom, shucking her dress as she goes.

Her shower is fifteen minutes standing under scalding water until her arms and back and thighs are numb, skin reddened and mottled. Lethargically, she turns off the water and steps out, wraps a towel around herself, and shakes her hair out from where she clipped it on top of her head.

“You alright there, honey?” she asks, lips forming a crooked grin at Will sprawled on his back against her duvet in his undershirt and boxers.

“I hate lawyers,” he answers, groaning and pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes.

Mac snorts quietly. “You are a lawyer.”

Padding quietly to her dresser, she finds a nightgown to sleep in. Clutching the soft black cotton in her hand, she makes herself return to the foot of her bed, tossing the garment down before unwrapping her towel from around herself, scrubbing water off her arms and legs, and making no effort to hide her body.

(Honesty, right? She still hasn’t found the courage to tell him what exactly is going on in her head, but she can do this.)

“I left, I don’t count anymore,” he argues, turning onto his side to put his phone on the nightstand.

She outright laughs at him for that. “I’ll remind you of that the next time you try to litigate during broadcast.”

“I do not—well, okay I guess I—when did that happen?”

Leaning up onto his elbows, he stares at the large watercolor rendition of the Tower on her thigh.

“Um… be more specific,” she says, before dropping the towel to her side and biting her lip. The look on his face is distinctly stunned, and she barely contains what she thinks it probably nervous laughter, even if it feels good to have him looking at her so openly. Eyes tracking from tattoo to tattoo, he looks like he doesn’t entirely know what to think.

She does laugh then, when she sees him squinting trying to make out the words on her ribs, and climbs on top the mattress.

“Wait, how many—?” he cuts himself off, licking his bottom lip when he rubs his thumb over the lyrics from _Breathe_ on her right ribs.

“Four,” she says, feeling her nerves twist and knot under her skin, trying to battle just how tired she is. But she wants this out of the way, at least, and it’s exhilarating even as her thighs shake under the weight of the day.

He pulls her so she’s sitting in his lap, fingers curled into her hips, warm against her rapidly cooling skin. Absently he whisks away a water droplet trailing down her back.

(It’s easy, with Will. And for reasons she can’t rationalize away, it sets her on edge. Is it allowed to be this easy? MacKenzie swallows a yawn, blinking her eyes wide when he leans over to spread her thigh wide so he can look at the tarot card.

Is it allowed to be like this? That she can be naked against him, at ease, skin damp? That he can touch her this soon so comfortably, without either of them blushing or shying away? It puts her on edge and at ease all at once, her nerves tugging between how good, how right, it feels right now, and how she can’t shake the creeping dark edges from her vision.

She needs to tell him, she knows, but the words die in her throat as she forms them in her head.)

“When?” He grins up at her, and she leans back, looking down the plane of her abdomen.

“Um… this one was early 2008,” she starts, pointing at the one under her left arm, before pointing at the one under her right breast. “I think this one was summer 2008… and then summer 2009,” her fingers go to the one on her thigh, last. “In Stuttgart. We’d get three weeks off every five or six months. This one I got after I came home.”

Gently, hesitantly, looking at her for what she thinks might be permission, Will runs his index finger along the scar from the knife wound—clean where it went in, jagged where it was pulled out.

Fidgeting, she redirects his attention back to the stretch of black filigree that intersect into the four points of a compass. “That one was—Molly’s idea. Jim has one too, and Danny, our cameraman,” And then back to the one an inch or two under where her underwire hits. “And this one was a dare. The other two I got because I liked them.”

“ _For long you live and high you fly, but only if you ride the tide?_ Pink Floyd?” Will’s looking up at her again, and she lifts a hand to comb her fingers through his hair, trying to get the cowlick at the back to stay down.

She shrugs, laughing a bit. “I didn’t really think about it. One of the marines we were with said I couldn’t handle the pain, so I just chose something to prove I could do it.”

“Could you?” he asks, a bit teasing, in a way that she knows is him trying not to laugh. “Handle the pain?”

“Just who do you think I am?” she replies, putting on a front of indignance. Swatting at his shoulder, she climbs off him, reaching towards the end of the bed for her nightgown. “Didn’t flinch… couldn’t wear a bra for two weeks, after, though.”

He laughs, warmly, and tugs down the hem of the short, black, strappy gown when she slips it over her head.  

“I like them.”

She laughs then too, shaking her head at him.

“What? I do,” he protests, turning onto his side to chase her when she moves to her side of the bed (that’s been too easy, too, even if it’s only been twice—she almost has to shake her head to clear it when she realizes they haven’t even been together for a day yet) to start clearing away pillows. He kisses her shoulders until she giggles, collapsing onto her front into the sheets.

Curling his fingers between her stomach and the mattress, he wrests her onto her back, smiling softly when she yawns loudly up at him.

“Sorry,” she manages to squeak out, her first yawn crescendoing into another.

After, he leans down and kisses her, lips barely touching to hers. “Tomorrow.” Pulling back, he brushes her hair out of her face, looking a little out of his depth. “Are you okay? I mean—that’s not—I just remember, with Sandy, you needed Xanax to fall asleep, and this afternoon you were—”

“Yes,” she says, before he can spin his verbal thread into a tangled web of knots, again. And then sweeter, lightly trailing her nails over the nape of his neck. “Thank you.”

She’ll tell him tomorrow, is what she thinks, lulled to sleep by how well his hands remember her.

 

* * *

 

Thursday night they’re both in meetings with Rebecca and the staff late, him later than her. He kisses her in her office during a break, and tells her not to wait for him, so she doesn’t.

She wakes up Friday morning covered in sweat, shaking off a nightmare she doesn’t remember.

 

* * *

 

Friday is her long meeting with Rebecca, who wants a list of what’s going to be used against them, of who knows and how much.

And how much _Rebecca_ already knows, which is too much, but she’s a $1500 an hour trial attorney, so she imagines Rebecca has access to information avenues that aren’t quite legal and aren’t quite legitimate. And Rebecca assumes that Will knows these things, which just sends her anxiety skyrocketing again, because it’s technically Saturday morning now, and the last time she saw Will it looked like he was about to throttle something before Charlie coaxed him into his office for a drink instead of pacing outside the conference room waiting for her.

She sits on her hands, offering meager bits of information, and she feels like a failure of a fiancé, keeping secrets as important as this, as much as she’s a failure as a producer, for putting Genoa on the air.

And she knows Jerry must know these things, too, about the fights with Blackwater guards and the months leading up to the stabbing, and when Rebecca doesn’t bring up the ambushed supply run, she doesn’t quite know what to say, except she swallows her pride and finally discloses to someone besides Charlie—

“The truth? I was fired from CNN because I was diagnosed with PTSD.”

 

* * *

 

_One of the first things I learned as a child growing up in a foreign embassies dotted across Eastern Europe was to always make friends with the kitchen staff. Because one, they will sit you up on the counter and let you taste test; two, they’ll teach you all the fun words in the language you’re trying to learn; and three: they know the real story. At the tender young age of eight, while being taught how to make salmon mousse from a sous chef in Athens, I had learned that often times the best sources are the underpaid._

_Friends in low places, as it is._

_(I will not go into the foreign relation faux paus I may or may not have created as a child during the Cold War.)_

_Still, upon arriving in Islamabad, like I had in Peshawar, my first instinct was to make friends with embassy flunkies and housing staff._

_This lead us to a member of the cleaning staff named Farogh Tanvir._

_Farogh’s younger brother worked as a courier in the greater Islamabad-Rawalpindi metropolitan area for a service that catered to local Pakistani government agencies like the Capital Territory Administration and the Capital Development Authority, who were in charge of filing complaints to the US Embassy about the Blackwater presence in the city. Farogh’s brother, who I will call Naseem, was able to lead us into Zone II, the poorest Zone in city (map on right) and to the highest concentration of Blackwater armed guards and the areas with high incidences of brutality._

_This was where we’d spend our months tracking down confirmation of Blackwater brutality, covering the rising political tension between the Shia minority—who made up a majority of the disenfranchised population of Zone II—and the Pakistani Taliban presence, and reporting on the eventual outbreak of religious protests and riots later that year._

_The former was not entirely disengaged from the latter, as we saw from Danny’s broken nose and would later learn from various more reportable sources._

_Trying not to drip blood onto the sheets of our hotel room in the E Sector, a more affluent neighborhood that attracted foreigners and diplomats, Danny held his tee shirt to his nose. “Well, that happened.”_

_“I wanna go back,” Molly said._

_I was inclined to agree._

_Looking back, I wonder if it was all worth it, the things I had to sacrifice to the job, and to do it well. I don’t regret going, or my time spent as an embed._

_As much strife, mental and physical, it caused me, those twenty-six months are also intrinsically a part of who I am now. I can’t untangle my experiences as an embed—the stories, the people, the places—from who I have become in absence of everything I left behind in America. I can’t let go of it all. And I don’t think I’d want to, even if I could._

_Even the bad parts. Even the parts that broke me, in the end._

 

* * *

 

Rebecca at last wraps up the meeting once she realizes it’s past 1:30 in the morning. When MacKenzie leaves the conference room, everything is expanded, louder, brighter, and she feels like everything has spooled tightly inside her chest, that her heart has become a quivering mass of muscle that keeps pulling in tighter and tighter.

Standing in the elevator down to the twenty-fifth floor, she digs her fingernails into her elbows, trying for force herself into staying, at least, outwardly calm. She has to tell Will. She was going to tonight, anyway, but now the prospect is making her dizzy and she just wants to turn it off entirely, take enough Xanax to make her sleep for fifteen hours and hide. And it’s not that she doesn’t want to—

Tell him, that is—

If she had just _told him_ yesterday morning—

If she had just—

The elevator chimes, and the doors part. She forces herself out into the lobby, tamping down on the urge to run, feeling pushed in and feeling the tightness in her chest reeling in taut and tense, until MacKenzie has lost faith in the notion that she has a heart at all, just a pounding throng of filaments that make up every sharp, blunted corner of the past six years, maybe more. Counting her breaths, she tries to feel like they aren’t trying to cut their way out, beating against her sternum and knifing down into her diaphragm.

In the bullpen, she ushers Neal and Maggie home for the night, smiling and nodding as they gather their things, hearing but not stopping to get more than a surface understanding of what they’re telling her.  

Will asks her how it went before she’s even through the door to her office.

“You really should just throw me under the bus,” she says, voice clamped by anxiety. “At least I’d get sleep that way.”

“Did you sleep last night?”

She shrugs, holding her elbows again.

“MacKenzie.” She doesn’t look at him. It’s still too alien, the decidedly ostentatious ring on her finger, the concern in his voice, his hand reaching for hers. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“It was five in the morning, Will. I got a few hours eventually,” she says softly, before swallowing. She ducks her head, curling her shoulders forward and crossing her arms under her chest; in effect, she winds up looking up at him. “It’s late. Can we just go home?”

For a moment, he hesitates, looking like he might launch into something, but ultimately decides not to. “Yeah.” Nervously, almost, he looks her over. “Mac, you need to take care of yourself.”

Panic, cold and seeping, overtakes her for a moment, before she tightens her limbs and swallows it down. “I’m trying to.”

“Mac—” His hands land on her waist, fingers expanding out to cover most of her lower back. “We’ll go—your place or mine. But it’s going to be fine. The suit’s not even three days old yet, Rebecca has her team on it around the clock.” His hands smooth up and down the sides of her spine, and she can’t quite bring herself to look him in the face even though he’s in front of her, and his arms around her. “No one is resigning. We still have the show. Genoa wasn’t your fault, I don’t care what Jerry Fucking Dantana says—”

“No, Will, Jerry’s not just bullshitting his way through this.” She doesn’t need to hear that it’s not her fault. Or that it’s going to be fine, because they have no promise that it’s going to be. She just—she needs to tell him, she should have told him. Trying to collect her thoughts into something comprehensible, she flattens her hands against his chest, tries ground herself against soft blue cashmere. “Do you think I was just—irrationally assuming one hundred percent of the responsibility out of some pathological need to—? I spent eleven months on the story. I spent six of them agonizing over whether to put it to air—”

Gently, he tries to stop her. “And it was Jerry Dantana who doctored the tape—”

But she’s beginning to unspool, and MacKenzie realizes she shouldn’t have opened her mouth, should have just insisted they go home, but she’s been here for almost seventeen hours on very little sleep, and now she’s just—

Everything Rebecca told her that Jerry’s legal team will say just keeps pouring out, and she’s desperate and despairing and wholly inadequate.

“And I fucked up the Valenzuela interview, and I put the team together for the story, and I sent Jim to New Hampshire out of some—fucked up sense of, I don’t even know, it wasn’t Peshawar so why the fuck not?” She steps out of his arms.  Gesturing wildly, she tries to create more space for herself, because it’s about to snap and spin out and Will is going to be caught in the blast radius if he doesn’t stop touching her.  “I let Maggie go to Africa, and Maggie—”

“Mac, you have to stop—”

“No!” she just manages to get out, a loud sound vaulted up from her throat, something closer to a strangled cry than a shout. Will startles. “Do you think I lie awake at night because of some noble distortion of the facts? I’m not martyrizing myself, I _know_ I’m mostly at fault here. It should be me and Jerry out the door.”

“Mac—”

She keeps going, barely thinking, just rambling.

“I’ve made shittier decisions on less than I did on Genoa, and they had far worse consequences, and now—”

He makes a false start towards her, and Mac is bitterly reminded of how short they’ve been together, how much he doesn’t know because she’s kept it from him. “Mac, if this is about us—”

“I was manipulating you, Will. To fire me. And I would have said anything to do it. I did say anything to do it.”  She won’t look at him, just keeps fluttering from point to limited point from her desk to her shelves and the window in stops and starts. _Jesus Christ_ , what is she doing, she thinks, fighting to keep her voice controlled.

Cautiously, he moves towards her, lowering his voice. “It’s going to be fine. We’re going to go home, and take the weekend off—”

“Because ignoring the problem is going to help—”

“Mac, what do you need me to do?” He grabs her elbow, not pulling or pushing her, but she’s beyond any sort of touch being calming. “You can’t—I can’t watch you do this.”

But she doesn’t pull away. No, she needs to—she started this, she has to force herself to keep talking. Stop thinking. Keep talking. Swallowing hard, she presses her hand to her throat. “Jerry has a—do you remember Nina’s Pakistan story?”

“How do you know about that?”

She stares at him, mouth gaping open slightly at his shock. “She was _hacking my cell phone_ —Reese was—it wasn’t just your voicemail that was erased. Some people _told me_ what theirs said, and the _only way_ she could have gotten it—the only way Jerry could have gotten it—”

“I can tell you what it—So Nina’s—wait, what was the Pakistan story, then?” he finally settles on.

“It was—”

Floundering, she licks her lips, opening and closing her mouth around a few tries to get the words out.

He tries to finish it for her. “I thought it was Islamabad. The stabbing.”

“I wish,” she chokes out.

The expression on his face shifts from a pallor of distressed concern to a gravity that is barely able to mask the horror creeping in over his features. “What does that mean?” When she doesn’t answer, thoughts whirling into dispassionate cogency to hide the terror underneath, the intrusive sense of guilt she carries with her, she can see he has to restrain himself from crowding her. “Mac?”

Voice small and constrained, she finds the words again, the plan that Rebecca laid out for her in the meeting, what she’s known since the suit was in it’s infancy. “Jerry’s lawyers are going to say that I have a history of putting my team into harm’s way to get the story, of going to extremes that are unsafe and that I have a history, as a boss, for failing during crisis and causing my employees to have to pick up the slack.”

“That’s bullshit,” Will assures her, sliding a hand along the curve of her jaw, cupping her cheek to make her look at him.

“No, because he’s going to have proof!” And then she’s beyond dispassion, or any attempts thereof, her control cut to the quick. _Honesty_. She’s been a liability since Day One, it’s why no one but Charlie would hire her. “He’s going to get a CNN incident report from March 2010 when my team and I went along for a supply run into a Taliban controlled area, something I signed off on. It’s going to say that we attracted attention as American journalists, we were ambushed, and it’s going to say that five marines died and we nearly did.”

She heaves a breath, locks her jaw, and continues, eyes fluttering towards the ceiling while Will tries to frame her face so she’ll look at him.

“It’s going to say that we got out of the cars when we shouldn’t have to get footage, that the risks we took—I took, were unnecessary. That there never was a fucking story. He’s going to get a CNN report from March 2010 that states that I was psychologically unfit to remain in a combat zone, and had compromised my team, and it was recommended that our positions be terminated. I didn’t come home because I fucking wanted to, Will. I came home because I had PTSD.”

He looks like he’s been punched in the gut, his grip on her loosening. “Why didn’t you tell me—”

The laugh she gives him is watery and disbelieving. “Because you stormed down to your agent’s office to find a way to get rid of me. What the fuck was I supposed to say?” She swallows it down, spools what little left she has, renders herself into something softer, wiping at under her eyes. “I lied, because—you had no sympathy for me. And why would you?” she says, more to herself, shaking her head a little, unable to look at him again. “I didn’t deserve it.”

When she moves to stand a few steps away from Will, he follows.

Breathing in disjointed increments, she steadfastly keeps her eyes on the carpet, feeling seconds stretch into infinities that fit into the space between the pounding of her heart.

“I was diagnosed with PTSD,” she says as levelly as she can manage, her voice sounding ragged and strained and foreign to her ears. “And I had it for a long time before the ambush. Probably even before the stabbing. I fucked up the call on the run because I was an inch away from a nervous breakdown, and had been for god knows how long.” The tears hemmed inside her eyes begin to burn. “And then I had one.” Pressure is building in her chest again, tightening when she struggles for breaths that come up as sobs, the trunk of her body threatening to convulse, as she fights her voice is kept painfully level. “And then I came back to New York, and Charlie was the only one who would hire me, because it got out.”

She curls in on herself, and realizes she’s made it worse, because now she can’t breathe at all. So instead of detonating like a bomb she’s imploding, like unstable gas ripping the viscera of a star to shreds.

Will’s just staring at her, and she’s just _crying_ , and she’s so fucking _stupid_ because she should have just done this yesterday morning, or earlier today, or six months ago because now she’s fucked everything up again, but she can’t stop, so she keeps going.  

“And now I lie awake at night, because all I can think of is all the calls I’ve fucked up, how I almost got my team killed, how I’m sending the rest of them into a trial, all because you and Leona and Charlie won’t let me quit.”

And then it’s less like he’s staring, more like he’s listening to her, and then she looks at the floor again, ducking her head.

A sob forces itself up her throat, and then another, until she cups her hand over her mouth.

At last, he comes towards her, murmuring her name, and she turns her wrist to press the backs of her fingers to her lips as her breaths come quicker and quicker, head beginning to spin her thoughts out before she has the time to realize she’s verbalizing them.

“And it’s just—over and over again, and I’m exhausted and I can’t fucking sleep and I can’t stop thinking about it, I can’t stop feeling like it’s happening over and over again, that I’m being thrown to the ground and sometimes it’s the stabbing and sometimes its the medevac to Germany and bombs exploding on street corners and shells hitting the roof.”

It’s always there, in the forefront. It’s why she’s chaotic, why she’s always moving, reckless, uncaring of consequence, trying to make it _go away_ and only ever making it worse once she slows down to remember. “Because it’s all on _me._ Because I’m their producer, and it’s my job to keep them safe, to make the right call, or someone dies, or someone gets hurt. Because for three years, it was how I lived. I failed—I failed you, but I was gonna do right by them. I was gonna make them great. I was gonna—”

Her body cuts her off there, lungs burning from lack of air, and when she tries to catch up it won’t allow her, her breath sounds harsh in her ears, and faintly she’s cognizant that Will is towing her back, away from the open blinds along the outer wall of her office and into the bathroom so that none of the staff left in the bullpen can see her.

In the next, he’s putting her hands on top of her head, forcing her arms wide until her chest cavity is expanded as far as it will go.

_One, two, three—_

_One, two—_

_One, two, three, four—_

She can’t quite hear him, her violent breathing filling her mind with an oxygen-starved fog, as she’s fighting to stay upright, keep her feet under her. Logically, of course, she figures he’s telling her to breathe, but her lungs keep filling with halves and quarters of what she needs before it’s all forced back out again, until her throat and eyes burn with the strain of it.

“MacKenzie—”

She realizes, of course, that Will’s all that’s preventing her from collapsing to the floor and honestly she’s the biggest fucking idiot, of course he was going to be good about this.

“Hey, hey—MacKenzie, come on, look at me. Hon.”

Her eyes keep blurring and sharpening at different points in front of her face, refusing to focus, but she manages to make her abdominal muscles to cooperate, and her neck. When he lifts his hand up from her waist to comb her hair behind an ear over and over again, she can finally control her breathing enough that she can actually listen to him.

“Hey—you’re okay, you’re okay,” he’s assuring her, voice soft, but firm. “You’re okay, Mac. You’re safe.”

His own breathing is calm, slow and steady, and she tries to match it. _One, two, three, four—one—one, two, three—one, two, three, four, five—one, two—one, two, three—_ to limited success, but her chest feels less like it’s going to implode, ribs splintering inwards until they puncture her heart, which is reassuring considering her head is still foggy and muddled, her fingers and hands tingling towards numbness.

“That’s it,” Will murmurs, slowly letting her hands drop back down to her side, and she feels her biceps shake from the strain from her arms being held over her head for so long. “I’ve got you.”

Realizing that her entire body is shaking under the stress of the hormones cascading through her system, MacKenzie takes an abortive half-step towards him, her relief knocking out of her in one strong exhale when he catches against him, arms going around her waist.

They stay like that, not talking, and Mac tries to figure out how long it’s been since he brought her in here. A quick look at her watch tells her it’s past three, so at least twenty minutes. Eyes falling closed, she buries her face in Will’s shoulder and inhales, focusing on the dimming thud of her heart in her chest, the encroaching haze of the adrenaline crash.

“Do you need your medication?” he asks, moments or minutes later, running his fingers through her hair. “Or something else?”

She turns her face so she isn’t muffled by his sweater.

“I’m just tired.”

“Okay,” he says, dropping kiss on top of her head, before shifting so he can start leading them back into her office. “We’ll go home.”

 

* * *

 

_We made a talent of pissing off Blackwater guards, which often put us at odds with the marines we were embedded with. Not that they had any particular fondness for the military contractors, but our presence made it harder for them to try and ignore them to do their jobs. But thankfully, unlike in Peshawar and the Green Zone and Khyber, we weren’t required to live in barracks with the marines. For the most part we operated out of a hotel room, unless accompanying the marines on an exercise or mission._

_Which was increasingly rare—we were quickly ostracized from good feelings from the military presence in Islamabad, and decided to focus on the news coming out of the Pakistani people themselves._

_Which also pissed off the Blackwater guards, who were hired to essentially systematically brutalized and terrify the Pakistani people, but especially the Shia population. The city of Islamabad is roughly twenty percent Shia, a minority within Pakistan who are often considered apostates by the majority Sunni population._

_In the time that we were in Islamabad, roughly eighty Shia—including twenty-three children—were killed in suicide attacks aimed at Shia protests and processions. Peaceful protests would be instigated into riots by Sunni insurgents planted by Blackwater guards and spies who often presented themselves as American diplomats._

_I, of course, knew better._

_In hindsight, I should have also known to be been more careful._

_As you can see on your left, Danny was able to capture the immediate aftermath of a suicide attack in early May, 2009. By that time there were an estimated eight thousand Blackwater operatives within Pakistan, more than half of that in Islamabad. More Blackwater operatives were in Islamabad than the local government had policemen on payroll._

_As I said, Islamabad was a city under occupation._

_And Blackwater was looking for a way to divert the growing anti-US sentiment._

 

* * *

 

It’s a blur from leaving her office down to the lobby, to a cab, up to his apartment. Will asks her if she wants her Xanax precisely four times, but her body is already giving out from the exertion of the panic attack and plain old lack of sleep.

In the cab her head rests on his shoulder, and he somehow scoops her out from the back seat and she leans most of her weight on him the short walk from the curb to the private elevator up to his penthouse.

Then absolutely nothing until it registers that she’s swaying on her feet next to her side of the bed, Will’s fingers plucking apart the buttons on her blouse.

Folding and unfolding her arms to slide them free of her sleeves.

For a moment, she focuses on his lips, tries to see if he’s trying to talk to her.

He’s not.

Gently, he unzips her skirt and sends it to the floor. Numbly, she sits on the bed, clumsy fingers going to the waist of her pantyhose. He lets her get them down to her thighs before kneeling and rolling the sheer fabric down off her legs.

Her bra comes next, but he leaves her in her underwear before leaning forward to kiss her forehead, stroking her hair back from her shoulders. Faintly, Mac thinks she says something. His name, perhaps, but her mind is so muddled from fatigue that she’s not sure if she managed anything at all.

Will folds her clothes and places them on the shelf on the exterior wall, rounds the bed to the other side, and walks into his closet, returning ten seconds later with a tee shirt that he promptly drops over her head. The expression on his face is soft, and openly afraid in a way that is almost reassuring—she’s managed to surprise him, and he’s not hiding it from her.

Lifting her legs onto the mattress, he pulls the covers down, and then gets her underneath them.

She falls asleep moments after she feels the weight of his arm settle over her waist, his chin coming to rest on the top of her head, and the rest of him warming her back.

 

* * *

 

_Our last Christmas we spent in Stuttgart. During Advent, around 280 decorated stands transform the Stuttgart Inner City into one of Europe's biggest and most beautiful Christmas Markets. The Marktplatz, Schillerplatz and Schlossplatz, as well as Hirschstraße and Kirchstraße are all given over to spreading some welcome pre-Christmas spirit with festive lighting. The air is thick with the aroma of cinnamon and vanilla, the scene comes alive with sparkle and glitter. The countless traditional wooden hut stalls are decorated with angels, fir branches and baubles, and Christmas music is all around._

_It’s a beautiful place. It’s also the location of the Unified Combatant Command and the United States Marine Corps Forces, Europe (MARFOREUR)and is one of the cities where I spent my childhood. Before becoming the British Ambassador to West Germany in Berlin, my father spent a year at the head of the British consulate in Stuttgart._

_CNN approved our work visas to spend the last week of December there, with the understanding there’d be one week of “work” and the first three weeks in January where we were free to return to the US to see our families if we wished._

_After that we would return to the combined US-Pakistani marine forces we were newly travelling with, in Murree. I haven’t introduced them yet to you. Consider Christmas in Stuttgart our bookends here, as I draw my story to a close._

_At the time I had no idea, but looking back I can point to Christmas Eve 2009 as the beginning of the end. Most would point to the stabbing—but they’d be wrong. I could have pulled myself back from the stabbing, had I cared to._

_Instead I pushed myself into the pain further. I kept hitting myself over and over again that in the hopes that if I hurt myself enough, it would feel good when I stopped, and that would almost be like feeling okay._

_But in 2009 Molly had no family to return to, my parents were vacationing in Greece. Regardless, in the midst of my depression, I had no inclination to see them. Danny planned on remaining in Germany as well. Jim, the most functional of us all, had been able to swing a flight home to his family in Delaware._

_But we were also in Stuttgart for a simpler reason—it was where Captain Noah Mason and his ragtag team of the 7th Marine Expeditionary Brigade had been assigned earlier in the fall, to be headquartered with the rest of the 7th Marines. He greeted us at the airport with a diamond ring to replace the tinfoil one he had initially given Molly in the rush before our transport to Islamabad._

_We immediately dropped our things off at the Marriott and headed for the bar._

_It was business as usual. We changed into the shortest dresses we had with us—scraps of black fabric that we could tuck easily in with the rest of our clothes—and heels we’d stashed with someone’s German girlfriend the last time we were in Stuttgart, and sought out the bartender._

_I wish the night hadn’t passed by in a blur. I wish I was able to remember more of it. I wish I hadn’t been so stupid as to drink an endless amount of Jameson ten weeks out from major surgery, until I was hiccupping whiskey and toddling on my heels. But it didn’t hurt, and anything that wasn’t hurting was good._

_At some point I laughed manically, and dragged Molly up onto the bar with me. Drunk herself, her lips curled into a liquor-rich smile, her mouth painted bright red with shimmering lipstick, eyes rimmed in dark makeup. It was hours from Christmas, and the hotel bar was playing some electro-pop remix of a Top 40 hit. I grinned back, because I wanted so desperately to be happy. I was far gone enough to think that if I believed the farce enough, it would be true. Before Will, I could convince myself into anything. Why not after?_

_Molly saw right through me._

_It wasn’t hard. I was slurring, bleary-eyed, eyeliner smudged into the bags under my eyes. I can’t quite remember what I said, but it knifed along the edge between hysterical and maniacal. And to her credit, Molly was no longer the twenty-two year old wide-eyed prodigy who had first accompanied me overseas. Twenty months embedded had matured her immensely, and she was no longer immediately pre-disposed to dancing wildly with her boss._

_Molly and Noah pulled me outside while Danny got water from a corner market across the street._

_We returned to the Marriott and went back up to our floor, and Danny bundled me into bed (that meaning he took off my high heels and panty hose, did what he could to get my makeup off, and dumped me on top of the one of two queen beds that our room was furnished with) while Molly and Noah ran out for take-out. And now Danny watched me with half an eye, finding a channel that broadcasted in the English language, settling on an old claymation Rudolph special._

_“I’m fine,” I protested, over and over._

_But I could barely stand, my head swimming with whiskey and vodka and whatever else I let soldiers in a German bar pour into me that night. I danced with men I didn’t know, in a short dress I was five years too old to be wearing._

_I think I figured that without Will, I should try to be who I was before him. But that was me, with Brian. So I had to dig back further, and only found someone else within me to resoundly hate._

_I loved Will._

_So I fished my BlackBerry out of my bra and opened up a blank email. I sent him three that night, all of which would be funneled into a folder an assistant had set up to receive my emails without him needing to even see them._

_But more of that later._

_Stuttgart is our ending point. We’ll return to Stuttgart, as I have several times mentally over the past few months, retracing from our first steps in Islamabad that May to laying on the cold tile floor in the bathroom of our room in the Marriott listening to Molly, tired and dismayed, read the emails to me in the small hours of Christmas while I hugged the toilet, retching._

_How did I get here?_

_And how much further did I have to go?_

 

* * *

 

Her limbs feel heavy, hands and feet leaden, but she’s warm, under several layers of blankets that keep her pressed to the mattress. Soft sheets that smell like laundry service fabric softener against her skin, wind whistling against the windows.

She doesn’t so much know where she is as much as she understands that she’s safe, understands that she doesn’t have to snap herself away, get out of bed, and go. She doesn’t have to open her eyes, not yet, instead rolling onto her other side towards the middle of the bed. And winds up curled into Will’s side, which is something she doesn’t want to think about yet, just wants to drift for a while.

He’s awake, because he’s sitting mostly up against the pillows, and she can hear the newspaper crinkling, but he doesn’t make a move to call her out on the fact that she’s woken up. She knows he knows she’s not sleeping. He knew weeks ago during Sandy, when they spent a few hours on the air mattress together. Will’s has always been able to tell when she’s faking anything.

(Except her mental health, although it seems like she didn’t have as tight a lid on that as she thought, and wonders in a nebulous sort of way how long he’s suspected. But, she figures, she pretty much out-and-out said it in the dark that night, her head pillowed on his chest.)

Sighing, she levels her face into his abdomen, slinging one arm over him so her fingers can curl into the skin left exposed where his tee shirt has ridden up. He sighs, almost in response, one hand leaving his newspaper to drift through her hair.

It’s almost the same thing as confirmation—

Will knows she’s awake. And it’s comforting that he’s not pushing her into talking about last night, which is strange because she has a nasty habit of pushing him into talking about everything, but she supposes (with Laura gesturing wildly in the foreground of her mental processes) he did promise never to hurt her again.

Slowly, she inches her way up his body before getting frustrated and pulling herself up to lean her cheek against his shoulder, tucking her head under his chin so she can read the _Times_ the best she can without her glasses.

(Which reminds her—with a strange sort of permanence given that the past few days she’s been expecting this to all fly apart with the revelation that she’s only somewhat sane most of the time—that she needs to get spare pair to leave here.)

“Good morning,” he says, ducking his head to kiss her temple.

She takes a deep breath before saying anything. “What time is it?”

“Almost noon.” Absently, almost, he brushes her bangs off her forehead. “You needed sleep.”

Yes, she thinks, that was apparent. She doesn’t know what he takes her hesitation for, but her eyes slide closed and half a second later she hears the newspaper crinkling, being set aside.

“I’m sorry.”

His arm drops, curling around her shoulders and tucking her into his side.

“Why?” he asks, turning onto his side. They become distinctly more horizontal. By habit, she tangles their legs together, shifting one of her thighs up to fit over his hip. “Don’t be,” he says, softer, the palm of one hand running from her knee to her waist and back again.

_You’re too good to me._

“I mean, last night, you didn’t have to—”

Silently, he sighs, but she can feel it in the lopsided rise in his chest.

“I’m pretty sure I knew what I was signing up for when I asked you to marry me,” he murmurs, deliberately gentle with his words and his hands, one of which comes up to play with the hair framing her face.

Mac furrows her brows. What does that mean?

“You knew I was a bomb you’d have to hurt locker?” she asks, repeating her words back against herself. “That sheds light on a few things.”

She doesn’t mean it like that, of course. Not quite; Will wouldn’t propose just because he thought it was good for her health. She’s not as self-absorbed to think that. But still, she feels unmitigatingly off-kilter, and in her half-asleep state is swinging blindly at anything to retain the smallest bit of normalcy.

Will doesn’t take her remark for anything, choosing instead to scoff, wrapping a lock of hair around his index finger. “I mean the ‘in sickness and in health, for better or for worse,’ thing.”

“I think some people—the Catholic Church, for example—would say I defrauded you,” she retorts, for the sake of the argument. More than that, really—she wants to hear that Will doesn’t regret this, even after seeing her like she was last night. He missed it, the last time, and maybe that’s more her fault than his, but still. She needs to make sure. “You could take it back.”

“Nah. The receipt said I could only return the ring within ninety days,” he quips, and she could hit him if not for the look of guarded concern on his face. It’s the way he’s been looking at her for weeks, but softer. Less afraid, with his hands roaming over her skin, trying to touch all of her at once.

“Will,” she sighs.

It’d be so easy just to bury her face in his shoulder, breathe him in, and go back to sleep. But she needs to stop hiding from him, so she pulls her head back to rest it on her pillow and looks at him openly.

“Mac,” he sighs back, lightly teasing. “Are you going to fight me any time I try to take care of you?”

There are a hundred and a half things she could say in response to that, all of them indicating some sort of lack of trust in him, which isn’t so much the problem. At this point, six years out, they both have roughly-hewed instincts that are going to be hard to smooth out.

“Yeah, probably,” she answers, resigned. “Until I get used to it.”

She can tell that Will wasn’t expecting that to be her response. His hands slow, and move to rest on her hips before he loops his arms around her, pulls her more tightly against him. Mac blinks, trying to get her eyes to focus on his face which has become much closer and as a consequence, blurrier.

“I… kinda deserve that,” he says slowly, before seeming to drop the subject and staying silent for a long moment. “You hungry?”

He rolls out of her arms. Sitting up, she reaches out for him, but Will’s already planted his feet onto the floor.

“You don’t have to—” she protests.

Will waves her off, pushing up off the bed, the tendons in his knees crackling. “I’m going to cook for you, Mac. Just stay in bed. Read the paper. Put on the weekend round-tables to mock, I won’t bring up the fact that you started out producing one of them.” Pausing, he looks at her. She wonders what he sees, if he recognizes any of it. “By the way, I love you. Just a reminder.” Standing at the end of the bed, he plants his hands on his hips. “Do you still like your eggs over medium?”

Mac laughs, even though she doesn’t really feel like it. She is hungry, though, and a bit headachy. Hollow, too, in a way. “Why do you remember that?”

He cuts off a wittier retort—probably something about how she never corrected him on how she takes her coffee, or the hoodies she never returned after the break-up, lovingly blame her for his continued affection—and shrugs.

“Because I love you. That also wasn’t a yes or no.”

“I’m not picky,” she demurs, sitting up fully.

“Mac.”

He rolls his eyes, and for some reason that’s the moment it hits her. Will is standing at the edge of the bed, in a wrinkled tee shirt and striped pajama pants, the cowlick at his crown sticking straight up. A bit bow-legged, but that’s because his knees are still stiff, and will be until he laps his kitchen a few times. His blonde hair and laced through with more silver than it used to be, and they’re both a bit heavier, a bit wearier. But they’ve made it here, at least, and if nothing else goes wrong, she gets to wake up to this every morning for the rest of her life.

She shrugs. “I’ve eaten a lot of powdered eggs in my lifetime,” she concedes, pulling the blankets up higher as she settles back into the wall of pillows propped against the headboard.

Will’s face opens a bit, taking on a shade of vulnerability she didn’t expect from him about this. “You’re referring to—”

“One day I’ll teach you how to make coffee with a mason jar and a block of C4,” she answers dryly, trying to assure him of the lack of gravity to her statement. And then smiles, “Over medium is lovely.”

 

* * *

 

They don’t attempt the conversation again until the next morning. They watch the roundtables in bed, and mock them. And each other, with Mac reminding Will that they were where he got his start, as well, in the late 90s.

Will gets disgruntled at Bob Schieffer, thumbing the remote to change the channel to ABC and George Stephanopoulos. On the screen she is greeted by the familiar visage of a bellicose redhead in a maroon dress and black blazer.

_Dr. Molly Thompson, Middle East Policy Expert._

Cocking his head, Will looks at the screen like he should recognize the woman in her late-twenties elegantly out-maneuvering a conservatively-dressed bearded man on his debatably Cold War take on how diplomacy should be conducted. And then looks astonished (which she understands, as she feels it as well) when Molly gracefully steers the conversation to her time as an embed in the Green Zone, casually name-dropping Mac.

The bearded man takes the opportunity to make the cheap shot at ACN, at which point a strange twist (which to anyone else would appear to be sweetly confused, but Mac knows is the precursor to Molly going for the jugular) in her smile appears.

“Did that just happen?” Will asks a moment later, befuddled.

On the screen, George attempts to clean up the wreckage from Molly’s cheerful and verbosely violent dismantling of a guardedly misogynistic attack on MacKenzie’s career in journalism. Mac chafes a bit at the man’s accusations, but they’re par for the course at this point. They’re two months out from the retraction, but the suit has dredged up all the muck—and the muckrakers, to be more specific—once more.

Mac blinks repeatedly, fumbling for her BlackBerry. “Um, yes.”

Behind the roundtable, Molly continues to rattle off stories they filed from Peshawar, the Green Zone, Kabul, Islamabad, Khyber, Murree.

“Still happening,” she corrects, tapping out a text message to Molly.

 _What the fuck, lady?_ She sends the message, and then drops the phone into the bed next to her.

“This is the one Jim called ‘terrifying,’ right?” Will asks, moving steadily past befuddled and into stunned. “He wasn’t wrong. Didn’t you say she was in print, though? Not—”

“I tried to groom her to be on-air talent, but she wasn’t having it, which is why I’m—”

Something that comes out in Molly’s diatribe catches him unaware; Will frowns, opening and closing his mouth a few times. “I—you were in Kabul for the hotel bombings?” Molly continues on, dispassionately telling the tale of Mac reporting in rubble after they climbed out of the shell of their hotel. “Mac? You—you almost died.”

She shrugs. “You already knew that.”

“More than once.”

Nervously, she giggles, fisting her hands in the sheets. “More than twice, actually. You know, considering all Jim followed me through, it’s no wonder he had no problem working for you back when you hated me—”

“I never hated you.” Angling himself towards her in bed, he makes her look at him instead of _This Week._

“You know what I mean,” she weakly retorts. _Not now,_ she wants to say. But there won’t be time later. Their lives for the time being will consist of meetings after meetings with legal on top of their already twelve to fourteen hour days. This weekend is what they have.

Will’s let her hide in his bed. And he’s been with her, for the most part, except for when he’s gotten up to take phone calls from Rebecca, she assumes. And probably Charlie. While she hides in his bed, under his covers that smell like him, staving off her anxiety and catching up on her rather staggering sleep deficit.

Staving off anxiety, she’s found, works the best with his arms around her. Or when he’s lying next to her, just reading. Or watching TV, providing her a running commentary on terribly-staged house-hunting shows on HGTV while she props her head up on his shoulder.

Yesterday she’d only had a brief sojourn out of bed to shower while Will cooked dinner, putting on more of Will’s clothes and crawling back between Will’s sheets before he joined her minutes later with two bowls of pasta. They had eaten in relative silence before she fell asleep on him shortly after nine.

He stayed with her, and that was enough.

Just Will. She just needs Will.

Who is currently (and very emphatically) trying to find a place to keep his hands, unable to decide on her shoulders or her waist or her forearms.

“No, this is—important,” he stammers, deciding he should take her hands. His face takes on the overly-earnest expression it had when he proposed, entirely too vulnerable as he tries to sort out his thoughts into cogent sentences, nervous he can’t do it quickly enough. “I never hated you. I should have done a lot of things differently, but I never stopped loving you, and I let you off the hook your first day back when you said you weren’t—when you said we’re all exhausted.”

“You can’t blame yourself for that,” Mac says, canting her voice towards a tone she hopes is soothing. “I just waltzed into the newsroom after three years, and—”

“And if I had bothered to read a fucking email I’d have known that you were traumatized,” he continues, exasperated with himself. “I would have—I would have—I don’t know.”

He runs out of words then, looking at her helplessly.  

“Well it’s not worth beating ourselves up over it,” she says, taking one of her hands out of his grasp to comb his hair back from his forehead. “If I had _known_ a lot of things, I would have—what’s past is past. We’re… well I wouldn’t go so far as to say happy, but we’re together and not trying to kill each other, so—”

“Please tell me you’re seeing someone,” he blurts out. “A therapist.”

“I am,” she answers, before getting distracted by the fact that _This Week_ has gone to commercial. Molly better have her phone with her, she thinks. But texting her again would involve searching through the folds in the duvet for her BlackBerry, or worse things, like letting go of Will.

Still, she is going to kick Molly’s ass _so hard._

Refusing to be distracted, she swallows hard and keeps going. “Laura. Her name is Laura.” Briefly, she hesitates. But he needs to know, and they have this one weekend, so she needs to tell him. So he can take it all back, if he wants to. So she can go into this lawsuit entirely certain of them. “She works mostly with combat veterans. Had a practice out of Columbia Presbyterian when I first came back, now she’s with a group in midtown. I had a panic attack so bad that I thought I was dying, and went to the ER. She was the psychiatrist on call. I’ve been seeing her ever since.”

Will looks as if he’s about to quietly implode.

“ _Don’t_ apologize,” she says,

Ever timely, Molly chooses that moment to text her back. _I do what I want. xx._ Mac murmurs an apology to Will, shifting on the bed to lie back against him.

_You’re grounded. xx._

“When was the last time you saw her?” Will asks. She can feel the rumble in his chest against her back, and then the quick hitch of breath when he snorts self-deprecatingly. “And yes, the irony this question is coming from me, I know.”

“Wednesday morning. That’s where I—”

Laughing (almost, but not quite, but perhaps if he was less tired, if he still knew less) he rests his chin atop her head, wrapping his arms around her waist. “You snuck out of bed to see your shrink?”

“Oh, trust me. I know how it looks,” she tells him softly, stroking her hands down his forearms before giggling. “I see her Wednesdays at nine. Which works well, because you rarely get your ass into work before ten.”

(Will doesn’t rise to the bait.

Which is fortunate, Mac supposes.)

“And medication?”

She sighs, but they need to do this. “Go get my purse.”

Spreading the bottles out against the comforter, she goes through each one. What each one is, when it was first prescribed, what for, how often she actually takes it. When she points to the muscle relaxants and describes the first time she tore an adhesion from the stab wound (“I have an unstable abdomen, or so says the Navy surgeon who did my bowel repair”) he greens and leans into her, pressing his forehead into her collarbone.

She turns her head so that her lips meet his temple, and then sweeps the medication to the side.

 _Honesty,_ Laura said. And they won’t have the time like this for it later. It can come out now, or Jerry’s lawyers can drag it out, and it’ll just plain hurt if it happens that way.

“I wrote a book, you know.” Will looks up at her questioningly. _Book? Memoir?_ She isn’t sure how to label it. “Laura thought it would help. Writing therapy. I wound up writing eighty thousand words. To be fair, I think the fact I was really pissed at you helped with that.”

He raises his brows at that—which, fair. To that she owes an explanation.

“You were dating Nina and stopped taking my calls past ten o’clock. I got bored,” she whispers, unable to look him exactly in the eye.

Making a low noise from somewhere deep in his chest that seems to be a combination of exhaustion and distress, Will slumps down again, rolling to press his face into her stomach. For a moment she has no idea what he has a mind to do, worried about the fact that she’s slept through much of the weekend, coming to the realization that she has no idea how he’s coping with any of this.

—outside of his repeated assurances, of course.

The weight of him on her legs is comforting, his arm slung low across her hips. His breath is hot on her skin, even through the tee shirt, and after a long minute he shifts so that his face is no longer hidden. His hand traces from her hip inwards, pushing up the hem of her shirt to reveal the tattoo covering the scar. The first time she showed it to him, she was shaky, skittish. He had barely any time to look at it before falling asleep, but now he’s looking at it, tracing it with his fingers.

“Can I apologize?” His other hand slides up her thigh, fingers splaying over the tarot card before moving up under her shirt, to her ribs and the lyrics and the compass.

“No.”

He has more things to say, she can tell (she can always tell, it’s her job, it’s always been her job), but he holds his questions. There’s so much to learn, and MacKenzie wonders if she should just give him the book and be done with it. But that would be too much, too quickly. _Slow,_ Laura had said.

The echoes of the horror Will had worn in response to Molly, her glib pronouncement of one of their many close calls, are still on his face. She wonders what it would do to him, to read her recollections of boys in uniform, what their eyes looked like startled by death. Or the boys who came to it slowly.

_I know what it’s like to watch someone be ripped from life. I know what it’s like to be shot at. I know what it’s like to be stabbed. I know what it’s like to think that you’re dying, that you’re never going home again. I know what it’s like to be in the back of beyond. I still don’t know if can come home from it._

_Charlie thought I could._

She needs him to, as well. But they need to go slowly. For them both.

Slowly, her fingers drift through his hair.

“What did she say?” he asks, after a minute. “About—”

Will gestures to her left hand where it rests over her stomach. Hesitating, Mac lifts her hand into view, her engagement ring catching in the silvery November morning light.

“She raised some concerns that we were moving too fast,” she says. And then more dryly, caging her words in a self-effacing tone, “Granted that was because I was onto panic attack number three in the middle of her office, so.”

Questioningly, he looks up at her over the plane of her abdomen.

“I was convinced you were going to regret proposing once you found out that I’m a scrambled egg up here,” she explains, before scrunching up her nose and laughing at herself once more, watching Will absent charting of The Tower. “And that I have tattoos, oddly enough. I’m not entirely sure why that was sticking—”

“For the record, I like the tattoos.” His hands are large and warm on her skin, his voice subdued, but sure.

“I could get another one,” she teases, tugging lightly at the ends of his hair before trying to smooth his cowlick down into place.

“Hmm?”

“Your name,” she says, just to see the look on his face. Despite herself, an honest smile grows on her lips. “Anywhere you want.”

Will snorts. “Okay, I think that qualifies as ‘too fast,’ although I’m not an expert—”

She pretends to consider it. “Eight years really isn’t that fast.”

“Point,” he concedes, before noticing the look on her face. Or the looks she supposes is on her face. “Wait, you’re serious?”

“Yeah,” she answers, only half-joking. And then giggles again. “I mean, it’s a little trashy. But I already have a butterfly, so how much further do I really have to fall?”

But again, Will doesn’t take the bait.

“But your therapist thinks we’re moving too fast.” Sound sweetly concerned, he pulls down the hem of her (his) tee shirt to her thighs and crawls up her body to lie next to her. “Do you think we’re moving too fast? Because we can table the ring if—”

“First off, we can’t table the ring, because we announced it to a room full of people. Secondly, I don’t want to, anyway.” Mac hopes she sounds convincing. Because she is sure—about this, their engagement, she’s sure that she wants this. But like she’s said, what they have is old and new all at once, and therefore uncertain in many aspects.

Rolling half on top of him, she kisses the corner of his mouth, smiling in a soft way at the easy way he turns happy with that. “But slow might be nice,” she continues, again not entirely able to meet his eyes. But attempts a smile, nevertheless. “There’s a lot going on right now in my head without worrying about sex.”

“Slow is good,” Will murmurs, pulling her in to settle against him. “We can do slow.”

He’s all around her anyway, and loves her scars without question. She has others to show him—the shrapnel wounds on her calves and thighs, a laceration from her shoulder that healed poorly, other strange little wounds that she can no longer put to a story—but now she just wants to put her thoughts away. And feels like she can, for the first time in months.

God, she wants to touch him and never stop. She’s been starved of it for six years.

She grins, cupping his face with her hands.

“Slow doesn’t mean you can’t kiss me,” she teases.

He matches her smile with one of his own.

“Right,” he says, pretending to chide himself, before rolling them over so she’s underneath him. Her legs open to cradle him automatically, and her feet lift so she can rub the soles of her feet up and down his calves.

Nothing about this is perfunctory—he kisses her with purpose. They do, after all, have a lot of catching up to do.

Which is how Mac justifies the fact that they don’t bother separating for much more than air until well after lunchtime, at which point Mac gets on her phone and wrangles Molly into a conversation about how she is not allowed to sabotage her career for _her_ sake, unless that involves finally coming on to _News Night_ like she’s been putting off for years.

 

* * *

 

The next few weeks are a hyperintense blur of marshalled resources, meetings with Rebecca and her team, and attempting to revitalize the ACN brand, starting with their coverage of Petraeus’ resignation.

Mac manages. Waking up in the morning begins to feel substantially less like she’s falling to her death.

Twenty days after its first filed, Rebecca answers Dantana’s suit. Danny signs a six month contract with CNN as a field producer, transient as ever. But he tracks what’s coming out of CNN, what Jerry’s lawyers are requesting, what will have to be subpoenaed. Molly creeps around at the Navy Yard, getting her hands on the physical copies of everything with their names on it.

Somehow, the gossip rags haven’t caught on to hers and Will’s engagement. They know it’s any day now, as the news trickles through the uppermost echelon of journalism, and across the heartland and the Atlantic Ocean their families.

(“You’re not knocked up, are you, Mackie?” her mother had asked. “No, Mum,” she’d moaned, much to Susan McHale’s disappointment. “You two would have such pretty babies.”

And for whatever it was worth, Liz McAvoy’s bitter resentment of her seems to have receded since their father’s death. And as goes the oldest McAvoy sister, so goes the other, despite Fiona’s vehement protestations. Mickey, on the other hand, had never stopped sending her Christmas and Birthday cards.

“I knew he’d pull his head out of his ass someday,” was the explanation she got. And when Will scowled: “What? I kept the faith, Billy.”)

It’s only a matter of time before Jerry hears, and his lawyers leak it to the press to prove their point.

Thanksgiving finds the entire senior staff unable to travel away to visit their families, barring Martin and Kendra, whose families live within the hundred mile radius one of Rebecca’s lawyers drew on a map around the AWM building. She and Will wind up hosting the senior staff at his apartment, instead.

(His apartment, for the space. They’ve been back together for a little over two weeks, no set pattern has been set yet. Some nights are at her place, some at his. Some nights they go home separately because one of them gets stuck in a meeting and they’re not quite comfortable sitting alone in the other’s apartment alone yet, and it’s impractical to meet up at the other’s.

At some point they’re going to have time to start moving changes of clothes and extra toiletries into each other’s homes.

The key word being “time.”)

Mac stays long after the last of the staff—Maggie and Jim and Neal—head out, drinking her third or fourth glass of merlot of the night after they finish loading the last of the plates into the dishwasher. She drags Will to the couch where they lie quietly for a bit, her head on his chest, and they muse tipsily on what the fuck exactly is going on with Don and Sloan. A little after eight she gets an email from Molly asking for a Skype date (Molly’s emailed the next section of the book, and while Will knows of its existence and roughly its content, neither of them are ready for him to read it yet), and shortly after ten Mac concedes to going home to her laptop, kisses Will goodbye, and promises to return in the morning.

“With clothes,” she murmurs. “And shampoo and real conditioner. To stay the rest of the holiday.”

“What’s wrong with my conditioner?”

Rolling her eyes, she stumbles up off the couch and lets him call his driver to take her back to her midtown apartment.

 

* * *

 

_The first question “How did I get here?” is the one I’ve been answering all along. That is the one I have an answer for. The second I can only begin to give you conjecture—two years later, I’m still in the middle of it. Recovery, my psychiatrist says, cannot be linear._

_But how did I get here?_

_The easiest answer is: by way of Kabul, Kandahar, Baghdad, Peshawar, Khyber, Islamabad, and Murree. The more honest answer is that I was so desperate to hold onto someone who had already left me that I let too much of myself go, until I no longer recognized the woman looking back at me in the mirror, and had no idea whether or not she was worth saving._

_That’s not to say that I couldn’t do my job. My abilities to report remained one of the few shreds of myself that I could recognize, and I clung to journalism like a drowning sailor clings to a life raft._

_(Editor’s note: In 2009 alone, MacKenzie McHale won a Peabody, a Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, a George Polk Award, and a National Press Award.)_

_But I allowed nearly everything else to be taken, or gave it away freely. Embeds do not just report. We are called upon to be in the middle of the story, climbing out of rubble and into crowds. We are put among the people. We hear them laughing, celebrating, screaming, crying. Living the facts of a story allows it to take something away from you._

_In early September, a suicide bomber strapped two explosives to his chest, and walked into a UN food office in a Shia dominated neighborhood of Islamabad, and killed five people, wounding nineteen others. The attack was in response to the death of the head of the Pakistani Taliban, Hakimullah Mehsud, in a US ordered drone strike. We arrived on the scene approximately twenty minutes after the explosion, hours before the scene was secured._

_I cannot adequately describe the atmosphere upon our arrival, the smells and sounds and sights that accompany human trauma. Each is different, but hallmarked by so much: the sharp cries, the blunt smell of blood, the acrid scent of gunpowder and incendiary, the cloying presence of smoke, the heated press of bystanders and victims. My mind tumbles through the scenes like a child whirling through the different patterns a kaleidoscope can make._

_I can remember them all._

_The UN food office was a smart-looking building, one we passed regularly through our travels through Zone II. The front windows had been blown out, and within five minutes, two walls had collapsed, rendering the structure unstable._

_Danny and Molly began to film, and Jim and I set out to start talking to bystanders._

_Blackwater guards swarmed nearby, and I knew the diplomats standing alongside the UN officials were also Blackwater agents. We watched one of the armed guards go up to a distraught father, and drag him forcibly away from the scene in order to collect his son’s body for the investigation. They next closed in on us, asking for our press credentials._

_Danny, ever mindful of his now-crooked nose, quickly capped the lens on his camera and dropped it into his bag._

_We went back to the hotel after that. Stopped for takeout from a place frequented by American diplomats, took it back to our room, showered, and ate everything in sight. Danny retreated to the bathroom with his computer to call back home, to his mother and nieces and nephews. Molly, true to form, stripped down to her underwear and promptly passed out on top of the covers on our bed._

_Exhausted, I quickly abandoned my meal and curled up on Jim and Danny’s bed. After a long silence, Jim flopped down next to me._

_“It’s just starting to seem inevitable,” he muttered. “All of this. This shouldn’t be inevitable.”_

_I sighed. “Nothing is inevitable,” I breathed quietly, careful not to wake Molly, as if I could. Weakly, I smiled. “That’s why you and I will never be out of a job. Besides…”_

_My voice tapered off; I said nothing after that._

_“Besides what?”_

_Shivering slightly, I sat up and brought the blanket at the end of the bed up over my legs. Jim offered to get up and make coffee, but I declined. Later, when I was too nerve-wracked to sleep, and Jim would need it to stay up with me, we would make a pot._

_“Mac?”_

_“Everything is contingent upon something else,” I finally said, my voice sounding distant to my ears. “Don’t ever forget that. It’s lazy reporting. You excuse yourself—” I swallowed hard, and stared at the ceiling. “You excuse yourself from the facts. And you excuse mediocre reporting, you excuse your personal biases. We’re human, and very few things are within our control. But that doesn’t mean we can’t see the facts as they’re shown to us, and try to tell the story so that it reflects the closest thing to the truth, informs voters so they can make an informed decision, create change. Nothing is inevitable, Jim.” I looked back at the ceiling to him, to the softly startled look on his face. “That’s your first rule.”_

 

* * *

 

Her lungs begin to burn, along with positively every single muscle in her legs. It’s true that she’s always preferred to run in the cold, but Mac started out this run with her heart already pounding from an adrenaline rush, and her body is beginning to call it quits in the middle of mile two. She’d needed a break from the book, so she’d changed into running shorts and a USMC sweatshirt, zipped her engagement ring into a pocket in her sports bra.

A quick run—that she had lost track of almost immediately, too entangled in her knotted-up thoughts.

(After all, soon enough she won’t be able to go much of anywhere because of paparazzi, right?)

She hadn’t realized how much of her writing focused on Islamabad and Murree. But it makes sense, she supposes—she wrote this section when she was so mad at and afraid for and low in love with Will that she couldn’t think straight. And Laura’s told her before, that the emotional trauma from the break-up is invariably tied to the trauma from the stabbing and the ambush during the supply run, since she sent herself over there to avoid dealing with primary trauma only to find secondary and tertiary.

 _You’re okay_ , Mac has to tell herself for the first time in two weeks, running through Central Park in thirty-six degree weather. _You’re okay. It’s over. It’s finally over._

Not entirely, she knows. At some point she needs to give up her manuscript to Will.

She checks her iPod where it’s strapped to her arm—mile three, minute fourteen. Her heart is pounding, but at least she no longer feels like she needs to run away from something. The urge to bolt had been so immense back in her apartment that she’d foregone the treadmill in her spare room and just headed for the park instead. It’s nearly empty today; dark grey clouds hang like cotton batting from the sky, threatening them all with a meager drizzle that will soon give way to a freezing curtain of rain.

(MacKenzie realizes she didn’t quite think this through, and plots her escape route.)

Exhibit B of Jerry’s lawsuit appears to be that because she didn’t fire Maggie for bungling the Zimmerman tape then Jerry should not have been fired for bungling the Genoa story. Mac regrets plenty, but never letting Maggie remain under her employ.

Favoritism, he accuses. She favors Maggie because of her own personal history. She favors Maggie and let her get away with too much. Because _she_ was unemployed after her PTSD diagnosis, after the stabbing and the supply run.

As if Jerry didn’t cook the Stomtonovich interview with _intent_.

What Mac _does_ regret is that Jerry’s lawyers are going to decimate Maggie on the stand, all because of her own mistakes.

_Nothing is inevitable. Everything is contingent upon something else. We’re human, and very few things are within our control._

Maggie is alive anyway.

 _She’s_ alive anyway. She and Will are together anyway.

She’s the EP of _News Night_ anyway.

Suddenly, the skies open on her. Shrieking in surprise, she does the math and bolts towards the Columbus Circle entrance.

 

* * *

 

Will is incredibly surprised and mildly confused to find her on his landing, shivering and dripping wet. Which Mac finds to be perfectly understandable, all things considered.

“I was out for a run,” is what she offers by way of explanation.

It only makes Will more confused. Which is also perfectly understandable, considering that he lives in Tribeca, and it’d be a hell of a run to get from her place to his to begin with. Fortunately, the credit card she stashed into the zippered pocket of her shorts and a forgiving cab driver made up the difference.

(She doesn’t know what to say, to be honest. It all goes back to what she’s been writing over and over again since last winter—she has to choose what to hold onto and what to let go of.

And if she feels good right now, feels like she’s on an even keel, she needs to act on it. Because it’s not going to last, so _god_ does she want Will to touch her right now.)

“I figured I could go home, shower, get dressed, go back out in the rain and try and catch a cab here—or you know, just come here.” Nearly tripping, she tries to get out of her rain-soaked shoes using clumsy, numbed fingers. “Jesus fucking _Christ_ is it cold outside.”

“I have coffee—” he offers, jerking his thumb back over his shoulder.

She could laugh. And does, stumbling as she levers one shoe and drenched sock off her foot, and catches Will staring at her legs. “Not quite what I had in mind.”

Somehow she manages to get the other sneaker and sock off without falling.

“Um—” Adorably confused, his eyes rake over again, and she catches sight of his tongue sliding between his lips before he bites his lips and looks very much like he wants to reach out and touch her.

Attempting to keep her hair from plastering to her forehead, she combs it back from her face before grabbing the bottom hem of her sweatshirt and pulling it up over her head and letting it fall to the floor with a wet _plop._ That leaves her in his foyer in nothing but her very clingy, very short shorts and her sports bra. After adjusting the elastic band under her breasts (and noticing Will staring fairly intently at _that_ particular movement) she locates the zippered pocket at the side hem, opens it, and extricates her ring, sliding it back onto the appropriate finger.

“What?” she asks breathlessly.

“You’re soaked through,” he blurts out, looking away from her legs. Pouting, she straightens up. _Don’t stop looking._ “Let me get you a towel.”

He walks away, towards the linen closet next to his kitchen.

Trailing after him, she rubs her palms up and down over the goose bumps on her arms, trying to ignore the droplets of water making their way from her hair down to the small of her back.  “Or you could warm me up.”

It takes a moment for that one to settle.

“What?” Will asks, a little hopeful (but mostly wide-eyed) when she pushes her shorts to the floor and kicks them off.

Biting her lip, she laughs with a warmth she doesn’t feel, if only because she truly is _fucking freezing._

“Billy, I am going to take the rest of my clothes off now,” she slowly explains, pulling him towards her and putting his hands on the bottom of her sports bra, encouraging him to pull it off her. “Keep up, honey.”

The offending garment is pulled off with a _snap_ , and lands somewhere in the middle of the kitchen. Shaking with laughter, Mac escapes his arms wrapping around her (pinning her own to her side) instead fighting to get her hands to the bottom of his sweater to yank it up over his head in between his lively attempts to suck her tongue into his mouth.

They fight each other the whole way to the bedroom, Mac desperately trying to wrestle Will out of his clothes, Will trying to pin her hands, tickle her sides. His fingers curl into the waistband of her panties and with an eyebrow arched to the practicality of running in _lace_ , manages to get them down her hips. They flutter to the floor, and with that, he scoops her up. Squealing, she wraps her thighs around his waist and lets him carry her the rest of the way to the bed and dump her onto it.

He doesn’t ask her if she’s certain or why she wants this now, and she loves him even more for it.

Sitting up, she grabs his forearms and pulls him on top of her. Her hands go from there to his biceps to his neck to his hair, lining up their mouths. Will groans into her, and palming her ass to pull their pelvises to meet, he uses his other arm to center them on the bed.

It’s exhilarating.

He’s already hard. She wraps her legs around him again, rocking her hips up into him. When he drops his weight onto her she moans, clenching her fingers into the nape of his neck. He traces her curves, fingers skating up and down her body entirely, from her calves to her hips to her breasts and back down again, until she opens for him fully.

Every nerve in her body is tingling, and it’s _good,_ to be overwhelmed in this way.

Heat settles low in her belly and is blown to flame by the sensation of his mouth and tongue on her breasts a moment later. His skin is warm and soft and even though she feels her body pressing cold rainwater into the duvet all she can focus on are his fingers pinching and tweaking all her favorite spots before sliding, a long minute later, through her wetness.

“Fuck,” she moans, giving herself over to the thoughtlessness of sensation.  

Will snorts from somewhere near her sternum. “Workin’ on it.”

Tipping her head back, she swats him on the shoulder.

The act itself is over with fairly quickly. Will doesn’t stop kissing her for the duration, nipping at her lips when she becomes breathless, shivering for a reason entirely besides the cold. His fingers rubbing circles into her urge her along, and the three and a half miles she ran before coming over catch up with her when she comes, moments later cursing a cramp in her left leg.

“You okay?” Will asks, lifting his head..

Laughing at herself and hopelessly flexing her toes, she groans. “You’re great. Just—god, you’re fantastic.” Choking off a ragged cry when he teases another smaller orgasm out of her, she tugs on his hair. “Come for me, sweetheart.”

Snorting with laughter, he slows down the movement of his hips—and growling, Mac flips them over.

It’s him who’s groaning hopelessly a minute later, grunting as he strains under her before she slides off of him with a happy sigh.

“Warm now?” he pants, covering his eyes with a haphazardly flung arm.

Mac exhales heavily, tucking herself against his side and drumming the fingers on one hand against his chest.

“I need a shower,” she breathes on a high note. She doesn’t unwrap herself from him. “Wanna help?”

The alacrity with which Will gets out of bed—pulling her with him—makes her giggle.

 

* * *

 

_I didn’t notice when it happened. One would hope that a blade entering your abdomen would be enough to give you pause, but the adrenaline was already pumping when it happened._

_“I’m fine,” I protested, using a spare headscarf from Molly’s bag to try and tamp down on the bleeding. I was standing, I was breathing, I was talking. I believed I was just fine—I had to be. It was day six of a series of Shia protests. “Jim, I’m fine.” Turning to Farogh and Naseem, I repeated the same thing to them in Urdu._

_“That man was—”_

_“American, I know.”_

_Rewatching the video of it, I’m astounded by how calm I was. Shock, perhaps. It would explain why I still have trouble remembering exactly when I was stabbed. But even now it seems absurd to contemplate, that Farogh and Naseem’s friend who claimed to be working with the organizers of the protest had been bought out by Blackwater. That he had taken the bribe, led me into the thrust of the riot, and abandoned me to stumble out twenty minutes later on Naseem’s arm, bleeding._

_Molly was impossibly pale, but I waved her off._

_“I just need stitches.”_

_Jim grabbed my arm and marched me over to the platoon of Marines overseeing crowd control. “You need a head check, crazy lady. You freak out about gum in your hair but now you just need a band aid?”_

_“It’s not deep,” I muttered._

_(How wrong was I?)_

_We went to a nearby urgent care that was a few blocks from the protest. Shouting at Molly and Danny to get back out there, I held up my shirt for the doctor, who advised me multiple times that I should go to the hospital._

_“Just give me a tetanus shot and stitch it,” I scowled in Urdu. “It’s not that deep.”_

_The camera kept rolling—the team refused to head back out until they were certain I was okay._

_And I thought I was. I truly did. I had been so sunken into depression for long that my nerves had dimmed, where very little could rouse pleasure or pain anymore. It was a deep, fogging sort of sadness that was only ever tempered by my nightmares, the panicked thoughts that kept me jumping in front of my team, offering to be the one to go forward with most things._

_I drove forward, of course, and did my best to put myself into situations where adrenaline cleared the mist and clouds from my head. I felt something, then, after the knife slipped under my shirt and into my stomach. I felt something, and for so long feeling anything at all meant improvement._

_I spent all of maybe fifteen minutes inside the clinic, before tugging my shirt down and stalking back out onto the street. I refused morphine, or any painkiller, a decision which probably saved my life. I wanted to keep my head clear, as it was startlingly so._

_The clarity in the wake of the stabbing was overwhelming._

_But quickly I became oxygen starved. At first I rationalized it as tiredness. But after half an hour of coverage or so I began to stagger clumsily, latching onto one member of my team or the other. Then my words began to slur. I thought I was having a panic attack. The sensation isn’t dissimilar—I couldn’t breathe, my ribs hurt, my head swam, and I thought I was going to die._

_It took Danny grabbing me by my shoulders and making me meet his eyes to realize he was shouting my name._

_“Mac,” he was yelling, over and over again._

_He had dropped the camera, and I lurched to the side to pick it up. But my side burned. Not even then did I realize, not until I tried to straighten up again and was immediately met with the urge to vomit._

_I did, vomiting up blood, before passing out with the metallic taste of it on my tongue. I don’t know why, but for some reason I can remember that so clearly, and what it meant—_

_It wasn’t a panic attack. I was bleeding internally._

_Somewhere, Jim was shouting my name._

 

* * *

 

Afterwards, she remembers Will staunchly defending his shower to her and Sloan over a year ago, and giggles while sorting through a pile of clean laundry in his closet and looks for something to wear. Finding a pair of her own leggings and a bra she thought she lost a week ago, she dresses, stealing an old plaid flannel relegated to a corner of Will’s closet that she knows rarely sees the light of day.

The corner from which she has always appropriated clothes from, to be honest.

Still cold (or cold again, perhaps, after an hour in the shower where Will traced the streams of water down her body, massaging sore muscles before turning his hands towards other parts of her anatomy, and then another thirty minutes back in bed, before he got up to finally do something about the coffee he had initially offered her, and possibly something about sandwiches…) she pulls the throw at the end of the unmade bed with her, wrapping it around her shoulders. Yawning (she could use a nap, preferably on Will, or at least with him on the couch) she pads out into the living room.

“That’s a good look on you,” he deadpans from the couch, pre-emptively dodging the blow she deals him in response.

Her stomach growls at the sight of food on the coffee table.

“Good of you to feed me.” Her well-worn muscles protest as she drops onto the couch next to him, swinging her legs up to cross over his lap. “Although aren’t you supposed to fatten up the calf before it’s off the market? Or what’s the saying?”

Sighing, she flops back against the cushions and pulls the blanket tighter around her, before staring at the grilled cheese on the plate across her from and level with her face

“You’re ridiculous,” he says, rolling his eyes but taking her feet into his hands all the same and digging his thumbs into her tired arches.

“No, I don’t think that’s it,” she airily replies.

Will snorts. “Eat your lunch, woman.”

“How much Jarlsberg is in this?” she asks in lieu of riling up the will to sit up again.

“Like eight dollars’ worth.”

“I love you.”

Groaning again, she flings out her hands towards him. With a facial expression that plainly indicates precisely how absurd he thinks she is, he pulls her up. They eat in a drowsy sort of silence. Will finishes first, and then occupies his hands by playing with the buttons on her borrowed flannel.

He’s always liked her in his clothes.

Slowly, thoughts begin to gather behind his eyes. She waits for whatever is percolating in his brain to fully form, instead settling herself on his lap and brushing the crumbs away from the corner of his mouth.

She’s thirty seconds away from asking him what the hell he’s thinking about when he says, “Maggie has your book.”

The fact that he knows this isn’t particularly surprising. Jim, Maggie, Charlie all have copies of the manuscript. Well, Charlie and Maggie have physical copies, Jim has a pdf file somewhere on his hard drive.

(Molly will probably start flinging pages into Times Square if she doesn’t get a move on with obtaining a literary agent. Probably with Noah’s help, because Noah finds everything Molly does adorable.)

Still, Will isn’t an idiot.

“She didn’t want to talk about Uganda, and I didn’t want her to think she was alone—” She explains, shrugging. And then her thoughts circle back to where they have been going the past two months. “I don’t think Jerry knows that she has it—”

“That’s not why I—” Will is quick to deny, grasping her hips and adjusting her until she’s straddling him. “She mentioned it to me, yesterday. That’s all. I was surprised, although I suppose I shouldn’t have been.”

She doesn’t entirely process his explanation, barreling forward anyway.

“I’m going to give it to you, it’s not that I’m—” _Hiding anything from you._ She thinks she’s told him that a dozen times in the past few weeks, and he’s nodded along, understanding. Told her that she’s never asked him for a written treatise on his childhood, she doesn’t have to give him the book. And in return, she told him that Jerry’s lawyers are going to subpoena everything possible to shred her credibility, and it’ll be easier if he just reads the damn thing.

Her fingers go from clinging the edges of her blanket (his blanket, his clothes, his food) to playing with the collar of his tee shirt, fingers skating down his front to his hips and thighs, over his soft cotton pajama pants.

“It’s… a lot,” she explains carefully, slowly. “In excruciating detail. I went through all my emails from three years, hundreds of hours of footage, hundreds of pages of notes and wire reports… it’s not just… I don’t want to hit you over the head with it. It’s not just… Molly says its more memoir than something like her book is, which is—”

“Journalistic,” he finishes. “I’ve read it.”

“When?”

When in the past two weeks did Will find the time to read Molly’s _three hundred page_ examination of the pitfalls of neoconservativism and governmental folly in Bush-era Baghdad?

“After you—after your meeting with Rebecca, and I put you to bed,” he says, in the timbre of voice he adopts when he’s trying to sound unaffected. “I couldn’t sleep. I bought a copy a year ago after it won a Pulitzer, not realizing the connection, but never found the time to read it,” he continues, shrugging it off a bit. “I figured it was a good time.”

Will takes her hands off his thighs and places them on her own. Lingering over the diamond on her ring, he licks his lips.

“You’re in the acknowledgements. She called you her dearest friend and most trusted teacher.”

It’s different, somehow, coming from Will’s mouth. Like all the threads are connecting, stitching something in her back together in a way that cannot hurt her. Swallowing hard, she takes her hands off her thighs and puts them on his shoulders, briefly considers using them to comb his still damp hair back from his forehead.  

“She’s in Germany, right now. With her fiancé, Noah, who’s stationed in Stuttgart. We embedded with his unit. I mean I haven’t been hiding her. Most of my… friends, from that time, are still overseas. Or Jim. Or dead.” He doesn’t close off, not in the usual way. His shoulders open, head tilting back, forcibly putting himself—at least visibly—at ease. _No._ “Dammit, don’t do that,” she pleads.

Will startles out of his posture. “Do what?”

“You’re—you do a thing when you start disengaging from something emotionally. Because you think you don’t get to—we don’t have to talk about me. Or this. And I can give you the book whenever you want it.”

But he brushes past her offer of the book. “What thing?”

For a second, she just watches him, watches him force himself to relax, soften himself under her.

“You open your shoulders a bit, tilt your chin like this,” she says, quietly, reaching one hand up to move his head just so. “It means you’re putting up a front.”

“You’re telling me—for the sake of straying into a bad pun—I’m an open book?”

“No, I mean… well, yes.” Despite herself, she laughs, shaking her head. “I’ve been your producer for how long now? If I didn’t know your tells well enough to solidly beat your ass in poker at this point I’d be a rather pathetic excuse for a—”

“Tells,” he says, giving her a short nod, before knitting his eyebrows together. “Multiple?”

“Mmhm.”

Hiding a smile, she picks up his hands, folding them together, explaining that when he laces his fingers he has an argument but is tired with it, but when they aren’t laced he’s just gearing up. That when he tilts his head—she does it for him—for half a second in an interview he’s about to trap someone in their own words, and he points with one finger when he’s angry and two when he’s feeling irreverent and facetious.

All the while Will is looking at her with the biggest look of wonder on his face, like she’s cracked the Rosetta Stone for being able to know him and love him at the same time.

“You know, I’ve wondered if I fell in love with you because I could read you so well or if I can read you so well because I’m in love with you. We were the best in cable news, once.”

“We will be again. After all of this.”

She manages a real smile, letting go of his hands and leaning in close, brushing her lips against his. “Maybe all EPs should fall in love with their anchors. It’d be good for business.”

Unsurprisingly, he manages to get her back into bed shortly after that.

 

* * *

 

 _“No,” Molly kept saying, voice wavering._ _“No, no, no, no. Mac, no._ _No.”_

_She squeezed one of my hands between both of hers, and when I could get my eyes to focus, I looked up at her pale face. I wanted to say something to reassure her, but my tongue wouldn’t work. My mouth was crowded with the bitter taste of adrenaline, my lips numb. And it hurt, finally, a deep stinging pain that flared with every jostling movement from the truck. Molly met my eyes briefly before looking over me in the back of the Jeep, before scowling at the sat phone she was plastering to her cheek with her shoulder._

_“Pick up,” she muttered. “Pick up, you bastard. Pick up, pick up, pick up.”_

_Then I was gone again, lulled by the rocking as Jim and Danny lifted me out of the back of the military vehicle. Faces passed over me as shadows, whatever they were telling me blurred by the whirring of machines, the steady report of the monitors they attached to me. Beyond the curtain, I could hear Molly screaming at some poor soul—someone’s assistant, from what I could gather—on the other end of her phone call._

_“Landstuhl,” I heard one of them say. That stuck._

_I grabbed Jim’s hand, jerking him as hard as I could._

_“No report,” I slurred, concentrating hard. “Don’t report.”_

_“I’ll keep it off the wires. You won’t become the story. I’ll get everything under control,” he promised me. Dear, sweet Jim. Loyalty was what he had promised me, none of this. That he’d carry Molly without complaint after the blast in the Red Zone, when her legs went pins and needles in the middle of a trek through Baghdad._

_That he’d watch men die, watch me die. Love is pain owed, and Jim never shirked from it._

_He promised me loyalty and I got it. I remember thinking that, before the surgeon at Kulsum International Hospital knocked me out._

_I woke up in Landstuhl._

 

* * *

 

They go back to work Monday, bright and early. Because that’s what they do. And they keep going in early, day after day, and stay late, night after night.

November gives way to December. Jerry’s lawyers respond to their response to the suit. Rebecca and her team prepare them for depositions, Will and Sloan and Elliot cover every media base imaginable. But somehow, _somehow_ , they turn it around. Jerry’s lawyers hear of the engagement, and don’t think it to their advantage to leak it.

(But if her mother asks _one more time_ if they have a date in mind yet, or mentions that she’d really look better in ivory than in white, she _will_ scream.)

Everything is stressful and everything is tiring—except, perhaps, their relationship, and Mac leaves a copy of the book on his desk in his home office before sneaking out one morning—but things are going _well,_ until the Sandy Hook shootings send Maggie spiraling, and then Jim, remembering his orphans in Murree and her Daniel, and they both wind up on Will’s couch drunk off their asses at some small hour the following night.

Then it just seems like some minor god is laughing at them.

 

* * *

 

_“Drunk German Christmas” is what Molly and Noah and Danny call it. Over there, we had a short statute of limitations before things became funny. So often, it was laugh or cry. Laughing may make you sound like a mad person, but it’s a good enough stop-gap. After all, if you start crying, you may never stop._

_But god was I sick._

_I wasn’t even supposed to be drinking yet, barely ten weeks out from the stabbing. But I was existing in this strange bubble of mania, feeling what I thought I should be feeling—gratitude, happiness, relief—and shoving down the rest. I didn’t let myself feel the pure terror, the hatred growing inwards, the disappointment that I hadn’t died. I was excellent at crafting the mask of the person who walked away with new purpose after a near-death experience. To most people, anyway._

_But not to my team, who was there at night, when my brain would let it all bubble up, and my mouth would fill with the bitter taste of adrenaline and bile, my body shaking and sweating, my brain chemistry betraying me into thinking I was reliving it. Any of it, all of it. Zack’s death, the mortar fire from Baghdad, soldiers shot down in the high grasses in the mountains, the stabbing, the rain outside his apartment that night._

_“All you sent in this one was ‘I’m sorry,’ over and over again, with a variety of typos,” Molly said from behind me from my place on my knees in front of the toilet, brushing my hair back over my shoulders. “And this one… ‘We were reaching the stars together, and I ruined it. I know we can never have that again, and that you can be the best without me.’ Okay, I’m sorry, but this is incomprehensible bullshit. Let’s just be grateful he never responds to any of these and move on.”_

_“I can’t move on,” I moaned._

_“It often feels that way when you’re hugging a toilet,” Noah said from his place blocking up the doorway. “But you can. You will.”_

_I was reminded of the ring on Molly’s finger._

_“Go be happy somewhere else, you jackass,” I muttered, spitting again. “Where’s Danny? He can be properly miserable with me.”_

_“I’m right here.” Danny moved into the bathroom, and knocked Molly out of place._

_I groaned again. “I fucked up.”_

_“Yeah,” Danny laughed, patting my back. “You did. It’s a good thing you’re with us. Your island of misfit whatevers.”_

_“You’re still drunk.”_

_He fell backwards onto his ass, scooting closer to me across the tile floor. “Bet your ass I am.”_

_Molly laughed, and then grew somber again, scrolling through my outbox on my phone. “You know, Mac, I understand that his hair is stupidly yellow under those bright lights, but the world does not actually revolve around him.”_

_I could feel them all looking at each other behind my back, with the same concerned face that only made me want to disappear._

_Eventually, the silence broke, and Noah began talking about our new assignment at the Military College Murree. It turned out he went through some small arms training with one of the men in charge of training there, Gunnery Sergeant Andrew Cartwright._

_“He’s a good guy,” Noah assured us. “He told me he’d look out for you.”_

 

* * *

 

Tess screams. At first, it doesn’t strike Mac. She drops, of course, falling over from her knees after jerking her hand out of the underbelly of the sound board. For a long moment, she stares at her right hand, red and twitching, a tiny dark circle on the tip of her index fingers. The lacerations in her palm swell with blood that soon begins to drip down her forearm, and at last she says:

“Well, that just happened.”

 _Then_ comes the pain.

Will is shouting, and Mac realizes that the electric shock must have turned her mic kit on.

“You said you cut the power,” Jim growls back towards some faceless technician, kneeling down beside her.

The commotion doesn’t slow behind her, so slowly she ambles to her feet with Jim’s aid, cradling her arm inwards towards her chest. Clearing the fog from her head, she remembers how to breathe. “I’m fine.”

“Mac!” Will yells.

Kendra, from five feet behind her, raises her voice over the din to say, “I’ve got DC on the line, we can throw it to them early.”

Snapping her gaze to the control panel, she watches Will begin to push himself out from back behind the anchor desk.

“You have ninety seconds back, you jackass, sit down,” she snaps. And then more quietly, allowing Maggie to wrap a clean rag around her hand. “Honey, just get through two more segments.”

Will sits, but with an expression that distinctly connotes his apprehension. “MacKenzie?”

The panic in his voice makes her stomach turn, the sensation of blood dripping from her palm making it turn again. Thoughts whirling, she thinks she’s not getting enough oxygen, and purses her lips closed to breathe forcefully though her nose.

“The sound panel glitched,” she says, forcing a tremor from her voice as the pain in her arm surges before returning to a nerve-wracking numbness. It was just supposed to be a simple fix, if she had just waited another ten minutes… but she has done it a hundred times overseas. “So we shut it down and I was fixing a short. There must have been a power surge, or something. It was little. Not… very little. Thirty volts, maybe. I’m fine.”

Tess shoves a note into her line of sight. _DC’ll be ready at 8:54._ Mac nods, before ushering her back to her seat.

“She needs to go to the ER, Will,” Jim says, leaning down to speak into the microphone next to Herb.

Annoyance cuts through her tangled thoughts, setting everything else aside. “I cut my hand when I jerked it back. I don’t need to go to the hospital.”

 _We've dealt with far worse. It’ll be fine,_ she thinks, peeking under the striped cotton shirt of Jim’s wrapped around her palm. More blood seeps from the wounds; frowning petulantly, she wraps the fabric around her hand more tightly.

“Mac hates hospitals, she’ll go if you make her.”

Sidling up to him, she punches Jim on the shoulder. On the screen, Will nods, before reaching for his BlackBerry.

Mac hears herself emit a loud noise of frustration. “Billy, I’m fine. Let’s just finish the show.”

“Maggie!” he shouts. “Get out here!”

Sighing, she doesn’t even attempt to stop Maggie from bolting coltishly from the control room to Will’s side, and listens to Will explain that a certain contact in his phone is the director of some department at Roosevelt Hospital, and to call them and explain that he’ll be on his way in ten minutes with his fiancé, explain the circumstance. Maggie nods and skirts out of the studio just before they return for the F-Block.

 

* * *

 

_I barely got to know Andrew Cartwright. That was the first thought I had as I clutched his body over mine. That I barely knew him, and he died. It was the opposite of what had happened with Zack, bookending my experiences in the Middle East._

_I turned my head to the left, where Alvarez was struggling to remain conscious. Danny held his hands to Jorgie’s chest, trying to keep pressure on the wound from their vantage point under the car. Footsteps approached from my right. Shuddering, trying not to cry, I turned on my side and took Andrew’s body with me, using him as a shield._

_The Taliban fighters spoke a dialect of Wazirola, a dialect of Pashto that I had no hope of understanding. And that was when I knew—we were no longer in our detour through a US held part of North Waziristan, like we were supposed to be. Somehow the Lieutenant had navigated us back into a piece of TTP-held hostile territory into Pakistan and away from where we were supposed to meet up with the 5th Marines 8th Battalion for armed escort. US intel on the ever-constant battle over the Afghanistan-Pakistan border was, at that point of 2010, sketchy at best. And we had been made examples of by the Pakistani Taliban._

_Danny and Jim had found us the people to interview in Shah Hassan Khel, the TTP insider willing to talk to American journalists about the machinations behind the suicide attack that had occurred less than a month earlier, killing a hundred. We just needed to go on the supply run with the Marines to get there._

_I groped his body for a weapon. His sidearm was gone, but to his back was the rifle he hadn’t had time to reach for. We’d just been walking along, Andrew pointing out a good shot for the B-roll of the footage we had planned to file that night, before the camera caught in the light and alerted the TTP to the presence of American journalists._

_We would be taken. Or worse. I couldn’t allow it to happen._

_“Not us,” I thought. “I’m not letting that happen. Not us. Not them.”_

_Molly, thought. They’d take Molly, the prettiest. For a brief moment, as I worked the rifle out from around Andrew, off his body, I wondered what Will would think. To hear that come down the wire, to have to report of my kidnapping, to show a grainy video where I made the Taliban’s demands to the US government._

_“Nothing,” I told myself. “He hates you. You have to save them, now. Save them, or die trying.” It was trifling; I told myself that I didn’t care if I died._

_I gripped the rifle in my sweat-slicked hands, sparing one last glance back to my team’s faces._

_Waiting until the last possible moment, I rolled out from under Andrew, clicked off the safety, and fired._

 

* * *

 

Will is ripping off his microphone before they’re even clear, shouting her name. Mac pushes up out of her chair, brushing off Maggie’s warning that she’s lost all her color, on her feet as Will bursts through the door loosening his tie. Behind her, Maggie works the mic kit off her hip and out of her ear.

“Maybe this is a sign,” she jokes weakly, trying to smile before the image of her curled in on herself and bleeding imprints in his mind. “God’s trying to smite me from his place high atop the thing.”

Wrapping one arm around her waist, he uses his free hand to cradle her injured hand and frowns tightly at the sight of the blood beginning to soak through Jim’s shirt. “Maybe this is a sign I should buy you a new ring.”

(He’s offered twice so far this month alone, and she’s not unconvinced he won’t do it for Christmas.)

Mac snorts, letting him sweep her into the hallway. “I don’t think the ring in particular is a lightning rod for bad luck, it’s my other hand.”

“Sweetheart—”

He barely spares a glance forward before pushing through the doors into the bullpen, ushering her through with him.

“My arm is numb and tingly—” she begins to explain, controlled and careful and probably far too calm for someone who has lost all sensation in their now-twitching hand.

“Your arm can’t be both numb and tingly,” Will mutters, his hand rubbing her shoulder in a way that indicates he is not completely cognizant of his actions.

She ignores him, swallowing hard when her stomach clenches down again. “Numb and tingly up to my shoulder. My hand and wrist feel hot, and I’m having trouble feeling anything but pain in my fingers and my palm.”

“And you’re bleeding.”

Tess appears from roughly nowhere and hands them their coats and her purse. Will spares no time draping her peacoat over her shoulders and shoves his arms into his own jacket. They have a silent disagreement over whether or not she is capable of holding her own bag, which she wins.

“Yes, I know,” she finally says, letting Will arrange her scarf around her neck and begin leading her out of the newsroom again.

“I’m taking you to the ER. I have a friend who’s waiting for us,” he says, voice hard where his touch is soft. “We’ll be in and out.”

“Will, I’m okay.”

Except she doesn’t think she is; once more she is becoming acquainted with the oxygen-starved state that predicates an anxiety attack.

“That statement would have a lot more veracity coming from a board certified doctor,” he mutters, jabbing at the down button in the elevator lobby. Frustrated, she thinks, because in his mind, he should be able to control every little detail, protect people from the absurdities of the universe among other things.

“Remember when I told you how I almost died a bunch of times?” she asks, and exhales loudly through her nose. “This doesn’t feel like that.”

 _It will though, tonight._ She has to warn him. Warn him that this has happened before. That she’ll keep it together by sheer force of will, go home, and crawl into bed. That her mind will force her to confront in her dreams what she tries to control when she’s awake.

There’s a list, in her drawer. On a piece of folded yellow paper ripped off of one of Laura’s legal pads. A list of triggers. _Hospitals_ is number three.

Will rounds from the elevator call button the few steps back to her, stopping for the first time to carefully take her injured hand and peel back the makeshift bandage.

“That’s not… exactly reassuring,” Will murmurs, rubbing small circles into the back of her hand with his thumb. She can barely feel his touch, but it doesn’t hurt. “Please?”

“Have I stopped you from taking me all the way to the elevator?” she asks with a small smile. Just on time, the doors on one of the elevators slide open with a chime.

“No.”

After he pulls her securely against him, they step inside.

 

* * *

 

_The whole thing was over in seconds that were stretched and pulled and oversaturated, my heart pounding in my ears like a ticking clock. There are little gaps in my memory. I remember pulling the trigger, and the first Taliban fighter hitting the ground, but nothing in between. I remember the second hitting the ground shortly thereafter. The third was taken out by the Lieutenant._

_I refused to put the rifle down._

_Noah had trained us to never put the gun down, that the enemy could always just be regrouping. “I’ve lost more men over more stupid things than that,” he told me, standing behind me while adjusting my stance, along with other words of wisdom like “squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it,” and “follow the shot all the way through, until you hit your target.” He laughed, then, because I missed the paper entirely._

_“Mac?” Molly crawled out from under the vehicle. “Mac, you need a medic.”_

_In one of the little gaps, a bullet had grazed my thigh. I hadn’t noticed at all. Blood seeped out from a tear in my pants. When I looked down, Molly came to my side and gently pulled the gun from my grasp, handing it off to Jim. My right arm felt dead from the recoil, and there was a dull ache in my shoulder._

_It was over._

_“Is everyone—are you guys okay?” I mumbled, blinking forward into the road, over the bodies._

_“Medevac incoming,” the LT said, stalking up and down the caravan. “Sixty minutes out.”_

_Too late for Alvarez._

_It would be a six hour drive back for the rest of us, during which I came to the startling conclusion that I wanted to live. I got out from under the truck. I picked up the gun. I fired the shots, and not just for Molly. And Danny. And Jim. And Alvarez. I fired the gun because there were enemy combatants inbound and someone had to. I wanted to live. Four months prior I had been strapped to a hospital bed in Landstuhl for two weeks, staring at the ceiling tiles while I was, at last, forced to finally examine my mistakes._

_I had decided, then, to stop trying to survive. In some ways it was a futile decision: I wouldn’t become something that happened to my team. But still I craved to find my way outside of life._

_I wanted to live. It beat in my chest like a wounded bird._

_But I had no life to go back to. Instead, I was bleeding in the back of a Humvee, because three years prior I couldn’t work up the nerve and stick around to fight_ _for_ _my life._ _F_ _or the man I loved. And I had, in the process, gotten people killed. In my misery, I had gotten five marines killed. I had almost gotten my team—the only family I had left—killed._

 _I held it together until we got back to Murree. Jim forced me in to see a medic, as I had refused to be touched_ _on_ _the ride back. Lost in my thoughts, I let him lead me to the infirmary._

_I knew that as soon as CNN caught up with us, I’d have to take the psychological evaluation I’d been avoiding since the stabbing, and I would fail. And our positions would be terminated, and I would be sent back to the United States. And by then, I had stacked up dozens of other things to be running from, besides Will—the explosion, Zack, sleepless nights in Baghdad, Jim getting shot, the night the roof caved in under the grenade, Chris losing his leg in the field, Molly’s face when she was grabbed in Islamabad, the stabbing. And then hiding under Cartwright’s body, taking his gun, and killing the Taliban fighters while Alvarez struggled to keep conscious. While we waited for backup._

_It all unspooled, finally and violently, thousands of sharp fractures spinning out until I felt like a pile of broken porcelain on the floor. I had to stop running._

 

* * *

 

Will’s friend, the Head of Radiology at Mount Sinai-Roosevelt, has them cordoned off in a trauma room shortly after they arrive. An hour later, she gets a text from Charlie that someone in the ER has already sold the story (complete with blurry cell phone pictures of the two of them - Will standing between her legs as she sits on the examination table after coming back from a CT scan, and a close-up on her ring) to _People_.

“Since when do you not like hospitals?” Will asks, ignoring the fact that their personal lives are about to be blown up.

Mac sighs, pulling him to stand between her open legs again so she can rest her head on his shoulder. “Does anyone like hospitals?”

“No, but, in the… continuing theme of things.”

Tucking her head under his chin, he puts his arms solidly around her. She wonders if he knows that he makes her feel safe when he wraps his arms all the way around her like this.

Will needs to read her damn manuscript.

“Since I spent two weeks high off my ass in one, Molly having to rip the remote out of my hand every night at 2 AM to keep me from watching you pander to the lowest common denominator,” she tells his dress shirt. In the corner are their coats, a black Armani suit jacket and blue striped Gucci tie, they’ll need to remember to return to wardrobe in the morning, and her purse. “Since Jim got shot in the ass covering us, since Molly bruised her spine and couldn’t feel her legs for a week, since a roof fell in on Danny. Since… a lot of things.”

Her hand has been stitched and bandaged. (She handled that better than Will did.) She has been offered and has declined Vicodin. Will has insisted upon her being given a prescription of Vicodin, because if she needs it his prescription is large enough to fell a workhorse.

(To that, MacKenzie had made a joke.)

“But you sat at my bedside for two days,” he says, trailing his hands up and down her back.

“I’m stupid in love,” she says, attempting to sound unaffected. But her voice is too high and too thin, the fingers on her good hand clenching too tightly in the back of his shirt.

In response to that, Will takes a deep breath.

“We’ll leave soon,” he says soothingly. “Frank just needs to wait for the CT to come back clean. And it will.”

That much Mac hopes they can take on good faith. Everything else is going wrong, even the little shit. But she sighs. She’s tired, her thoughts have settled, her head feels empty and it still feels like she’s not breathing well enough. It’s going to come.

“I’m going to wake up screaming tonight, as a warning,” she says, exhausted. And then offers, knowing full and well that Will won’t take it, “Maybe I should sleep at my place.”

As she knew he would, he makes a small discontented noise.

“Then that’s where I’ll be sleeping too,” he replies. “I’m stupid in love, too.”

He takes her back to his apartment forty minutes later, and they dodge the photographers stationed outside his building. They reheat leftover Chinese and eat it in the kitchen. They get ready for bed together, Will helping her out of her dress and into pajamas. After she slides between the sheets he disappears into his study and returns with the 3 inch binder that contains the pages of her manuscript.

 

* * *

 

_I don’t quite remember that night, which my psychiatrist says is to be expected from a mental break. I know, from what I’ve been told, that Jim sat and held my hand. I know that Molly got ahold of Noah. I know it was kept off the wires, but our point person in CNN Atlanta heard anyway._

_I don’t remember anything until Danny eased himself next to me in bed with the laptop hooked up to the satellite phone. He sat me up, made me drink a glass of room temperature water, washed my face with a cold cloth. I don’t know if he said anything. Probably not._

_It was 5 AM in Islamabad, 8 PM in New York City, and Danny had found a stream for News Night. I hadn’t watched since I was chained to my bed in Landstuhl, and before that it had been over a year. In Landstuhl, I was in the burnout of a morphine haze, and it took Molly twenty minutes to walk in from a cigarette break and change the channel before the beginning of the C block._

_We watched the entire show. I cried through it._

_But I stopped panicking._

 

* * *

 

She’s not wrong. Briefly she considers fighting sleep, but hears Laura chiding her for that months (and years) before. So instead she takes four ibuprofen and two diphenhydramine and lets them drag her under.

Three hours later, Will is shaking her awake (voice teetering towards) yelling her name. Thrashing, she bursts out of his loose grasp, her feet tangling in the sheets as she fights her way out of the bed. Eyes still not open, she pitches towards the floor, nearly falling to her knees before catching herself on her uninjured hand.

Her mouth fills with the bitter taste of adrenaline and the sour bite of bile.

The hard knock of her knees onto tile is comforting, and once she gets the toilet lid up and heaves she finally feels like she can open her eyes. And then immediately squeezes them closed again when the room begins to tilt and twirl and make her stomach clench down more. The light switches on, and Will drops down next to her, carefully gathering her hair back from her face. She hears his voice, but every other sense is on overload and her brain filters out his words. Tentatively, he runs a hand down her back and she jumps. Faintly, she hears him apologize.

He talks to her until her mind clears.

Somehow they wind up on the bathroom floor, Will sitting up against the wall, her lying with her head in his lap, a cold cloth on her brow. Her body is beginning to protest it’s treatment, something that Mac deeply resents seeing as _she_ had absolutely nothing to do with her mind deciding to relive the ambush.

But the tile floor under her is cold through the thin cotton of her pajamas, and grounds her well-enough.

“How can I help you?” he quietly asks, after a long stretch of listening to the quiet hissing of heated air being pushed through the vent a few feet from them. Opening her eyes again, she sees him scrub a hand awkwardly over his face. “The first night this happened I called Jim, and he said—”

“What?” she asks with a frown, when he pauses.

“Just to talk to you,” he finishes stiltedly, like he doesn’t quite understand what he’s saying. “That it would be enough if I talked to you.”

_Oh, Jim._

“You’re enough,” she confirms, half-desperate in a very tired sort of way. Will needs to know that; whatever they are, it’s enough. And then, screwing up her face and unsure if she really wants to know the answer, she asks, “Where did you get up to, in the book?”

“Zack,” he softly replies, combing her hair out over his thigh. “Charlie told me, your first day back, that you’d been to too many funerals. But I didn’t even think—”

“Things happen in a war.”

She wonders what he must think about her. After all, Will never got to make a conscious choice about who his father was, didn’t choose to grow up the way he did. She, on the other hand, flung herself wholeheartedly into fragile pockets of the world, hoping to run into something that would be kind enough to take her apart bit by bit.

“I’m sorry,” he says, voice barely audible. “And I meant it, it’s not—what I said, on Election Night. It’s not all your fault, and I’m never going to hurt you again. I could have done as many things differently as you could have.”

Gently her eyes drift shut, his face too lined with anxiety in the fluorescent bathroom lights, the hour too late.

“It’s in the past,” she assures him tenderly. “We have to let it go. I think I’m done trying to endure things.” And then cracking a hopeful smile, “I really don’t want another ring.”

It’s large and a little gaudy and it’s taken her awhile, but it doesn’t hurt her to look at it. What’s happened has happened. They have to live with it now, and they’re okay, she thinks.

“Okay,” Will mumbles, still pre-occupied with whatever self-flagellating thought he’s entertaining.

“You should feel free to buy me matching earrings, though.”

“Okay,” he chuckles, tipping his head back against the wall. “He seemed like he was a good kid,” he says, eventually, after they sit in a comfortable silence for a long while, her heart rate finally returning to normal. Or what passes for normal, since Genoa.

“He reminded me a lot of you,” she says, moving her hands from where they rest crossed over her middle. Takes one of his in hers. “Heart the size of a range rover, had to be beaten into submission to get a haircut…” Will rolls his eyes without any actual malice. “His mother still emails me, sometimes… you do understand that if we go with the whole big wedding thing, there will be a platoon of Marines there.”

 _That_ unnerves him, and she giggles tiredly.

“They called you Mum?” he asks teasingly in return.

“I berated a few of them for calling me ma’am,” she explains. “I’m not sure which was worse.”  

They fall back into silence, and soon her body begins to drag her back into a slumber she has no doubt she will try to fight, no matter that they have to be at work at nine in the morning.

“Do you want to move somewhere more comfortable?” Will asks when he notices that she’s unable to keep her eyes open.

“I’m too tired to move,” she mutters, turning half onto her side to bury her face into the belly of his sweatshirt.

“Bed or couch?” he asks, carefully lifting her head and sliding out from under her. The tendons in his knees creak as he gets to his feet.

Confused, she opens her eyes and blinks up at him. But she is so, so tired, her limbs deadened and where it doesn’t hurt, she feels a low thrumming of exhaustion, her pulse beating throughout her body. “Will—”

She shivers, and carefully he scoops her up against his chest.  

“Bed or couch?” he asks again, gingerly getting all the way to his feet.

Mac sighs. “Couch.”

She’s asleep before he places her down onto the cushions.

 

* * *

 

The alarm on his cell phone wakes her up shortly after 8 AM. Will is asleep spooned up behind her on the narrow couch, the binder open to page 198. He’d stopped reading after the night in Baghdad when she and Danny had gotten stuck outside the Green Zone past curfew and ran into a group of Al Qaeda militants who were willing to speak to them anonymously after the May 2008 bombings.

Eight months ago, she’d written that in the hopes that one day it would hurt him. All her needless risks and the successes they benefited.

The automatic grinder on the coffee machine in the kitchen goes off, startling him awake. Leaning down, she kisses him before he has the chance to open his eyes.

 

* * *

 

He slips the binder into his briefcase before they head to the newsroom. As a courtesy she warns Jim on the way in, and Maggie and Tess trail them into her office.

 _In Touch_ is reporting that she’s pregnant. _People_ says that they got back together the night they retracted the Genoa story, and _Star_ says it’s a ploy for spousal privilege. Jerry Dantana has refused to comment. Reese Lansing has released a statement through Rebecca that AWM is thrilled for their employees to have found love and commitment to each other in a dark moment, which Mac immediately deduces was written by Charlie. And Nina Howard, god bless her, runs a scathing piece on her new blog accusing the both of them of being cold, calculating, and hysterical enough to be running this as a gambit while also being toxically in love with each other.

Mac makes a mental note to send Nina flowers, or something.

Whatever people do when they’re trying to be the bigger person.

Will follows her the whole day. During lunch he pushes her into her bathroom and kneels, ignoring the surprise on her face, and pushes up the hem of her wool pencil skirt to look at a shrapnel scar he missed despite his attentions to her body in the past month.

 

* * *

 

She doesn’t look up immediately when he steps into the bedroom, attempting to finish typing out an email to Jim on her BlackBerry. When he doesn’t say anything, she looks up, mouth half poised on a question about how exactly and in what manner they should fuck with _Star._ His face is half-panicked, completely intent, mouth tight like he’s holding himself back from rambling.

His hands, hanging limply at his sides, twitch towards her.

“You finished it.”

Not a question.

Carefully, she saves the email as a draft and places her phone on the nightstand she’s appropriated as her own. After a long breath, he nods once. Shaken, she thinks. Will looks shaken. Unnerved. A dozen other adjectives that mean nothing when Will lurches forward towards the bed, something hot and desperate taking hold of his features.

Climbing onto the bed, he pushes her legs apart and lays between them. He searches out her mouth next, pushing his tongue between her lips while his trembling hands come to the waist of her panties, pushing them down and off. He spares her none of his weight; it takes her far too long to pull his clothes off.

He needs her. She knows the feeling.

Wrenching his lips from hers, he trails his mouth down her jaw, the line of her throat, sucks a mark into where her neck meets her shoulder and then soothes it with his tongue. _Faster,_ she thinks. It seems like he doesn’t know where to keep his hands, his fingers clenching into her hips and waist, his hands grabbing her thighs, arranging her legs around him.

Blindly palming for the nightstand, she manages to pull open the top drawer and extract a bottle of lube, shoving it into one of his hands. Will kneels between her legs and she takes the spared seconds to pull her shirt up over head and toss it aside. As he readies himself, and then her, his eyes stay on her the entire time, raking up and down her frame.

The scar from the bullet graze on the outside of her right thigh. The scar from the stabbing. The shrapnel scar on her left leg. Her waist, her hips, her breasts. Her eyes, finally leaning down again to bracket her head with his arms. Gasping, her hands trail down his back when his hips ride down against her own, and then she reaches between them and puts him at her entrance.

He’s unusually quiet. But so is she, threading her fingers through his hair and keeping his mouth near her ear, listening to every hitch of his breath, every strangled groan.

Her orgasm surprises her—she’s not paying too close attention to herself, and her pleasure washes up over her in a sudden wave. Her nails scratch up his back, mouth opening as a silent moan contains itself in her throat. When her eyes slit back open Will has slowed, is watching her with a look of awe on his face.

“Honey?” she murmurs. Softening her breathing, she rubs the soles of her feet up and down his calves.

Sighing unevenly, he buries his face in her shoulder, picking up his pace again.

He lasts a minute or so past that, his breathing growing more and more ragged as he nears completion. She pretends that she doesn’t know that’s what he sounds like when he’s on the verge of crying.

Eventually, Will collects himself to roll off her, taking her with him. There’s nothing to say, not really. They watch each other instead, as their breathing calms. Until something strikes Will, and he asks, “The Don Quixote metaphor… that was Charlie?”

There’s really no answer to that, and she winds up rolling on top of him, laughing until he joins in.

 

* * *

 

_If you take it apart, what does it become? You have to choose what you hold onto to put it back together. Broken pieces will build a broken person. Keep what’s still whole and let the rest go. Find new pieces to fit with what you have left, and rebuild yourself from the ruin. It’s as simple and as cruel as that: holding on, and letting go._

_I was in New York for a moment, and then I was gone. Six months in Kabul and Kandahar, four months in Peshawar, almost a year in the Green Zone, five months in Islamabad, three in Murree. There, and away. To beyond and back._

_Like I said. In 2005, I fell in love with a man. This was what happened after._

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **A/N:** Comments on this (like Part I) would be immensely appreciated. I've spent the greater part of four months working on this part, and while I'm very excited to finally post it, I'm also very anxious. Besides, I deserve a Not As Much of a Jerk As You Could Have Been award for not breaking up this 30,000 word chapter into smaller chapters. Or something. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

>  **A/N:** In a lot of ways the past few months this fic has become my baby. I've poured a lot of myself--my own experiences with trauma and PTSD--into it, so it's a little nerve-wracking for me to give it up and publish it. I guess basically what I'm saying is thank you for reading, and I would be really, really appreciative to receive feedback. 
> 
> Part II will encompass the months following _Election Night Part: II_ and will hopefully be posted in the next two weeks.


End file.
